Harnessing Radical Chemistry via Electrochemical Transition Metal Catalysis

The merger of transition metal catalysis and electroorganic synthesis has recently emerged as a versatile platform for the development of highly enabling radical reactions in a sustainable fashion. Electrochemistry provides access to highly reactive radical species under extremely mild reaction conditions from abundant native functionalities. Transition metal catalysts can be used as redox-active electrocatalysts to shuttle electrons, chiral information to organic substrates, and the reactive intermediates in the electrolytic systems. The combination of these strategies in this mechanistic paradigm thus makes the generation and utilization of radical species in a chemoselective manner and allows further application to more synthetically attractive enantioselective radical transformations. This perspective discusses key advances over the past few years in the field of electrochemical transition metal catalysis and demonstrates how the unique features of this strategy permit challenging or previously elusive transformations via radical pathways to be successfully achieved.