Abstract
The oxidation of organic substrates is of fundamental importance in nature and includes key transformations in organic synthesis and industry. Dioxygen (O2) is potentially the greenest oxidant because O2 is available in air and its reduction product is water, which is environmentally the most benign substance. However, the direct thermal oxidation of organic substrates with O2 is spin-forbidden because the spin state of ground-state O2 is triplet and the spin state of most organic substrates is singlet. Transition metal complexes can react with triplet O2 in the presence of an electron source to produce metal-oxygen intermediates, such as metal-oxo and metal-hydroperoxo complexes, that can oxidize substrates under mild conditions. Various thermal and photocatalytic mechanisms of the oxidation of organic substrates by O2 with transition metal complexes have been critically discussed by focusing on how metal-oxygen intermediates are produced in the presence of an electron source and then react with organic substrates. Metal-oxygen intermediates are more easily produced by the reactions of metal complexes with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and act as active catalysts for the oxidation of substrates by H2O2. The photocatalytic oxidation of water by O2 to produce H2O2 has been combined with the catalytic oxidation of organic substrates by H2O2 to achieve the photocatalytic oxidation of organic substrates by O2. The photocatalytic oxidation of organic substrates by O2 with the use of water as an electron source has also been made possible by the use of inorganic and organic photocatalysts, which can be combined with transition metal complexes as catalysts for thermal reaction steps.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 948-963 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Green Chemistry |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of their collaborators and co-workers in the cited references and the financial support by a SENTAN project from JST and by a JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 16H02268 to S. F.) from MEXT, Japan, and by the NRF of Korea through CRI (NRF-2012R1A3A2048842 to W. N.), GRL (NRF-2010-00353 to W. N.) and Basic Science Research Program (2017R1D1A1B03029982 to Y. M. L. and 2017R1D1A1B03032615 to S. F.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Royal Society of Chemistry.