Functionalization of Peptides via Radical Arylation

Among the manifold methods for the functionalization of peptides known today, radical chemistry has so far only rarely been exploited to introduce structural modifications on this challenging type of substrate. In this short review, we give an overview showing that, especially, radical arylation reactions can represent attractive and powerful tools to access functionalized peptides under mild and biocompatible conditions where no protecting group strategy is required. Besides offering new opportunities to directly synthesize functionalized peptides for diverse biological applications, including drug development, it is also our intention to give deeper insight into aryl radical generation and aryl radical reactivity, which can, in a wider sense, be highly useful for future developments in the field of the selective radical functionalization of biomacromolecules.