Organic Selenocyanates: Rapid Advancements and Applicationsin the Field of Organic Chemistry

Abstract

Abstract The incorporation of the cyanato‐chalcogen group (OCN, SCN, and SeCN) has piqued the interest of many researchers in the field of modern organic synthetic chemistry. Methodologies for selenocyanation are far less advanced than those for OCN and SCN chemistry due to the scarcity of SeCN transfer reagents and synthetic approaches. It has also been discovered that the selenocyanate precursor (SeCN) performs significantly better than the thiocyanate (SCN) precursor in terms of pharmacological properties of organic scaffolds. Recent years, new reagents (nucleophilic, electrophilic, radical) and techniques were introduced that allowed the creation of the selenocyanato group uncomplicatedly under gentle reaction conditions, particularly in transition metal catalysis and photo‐/electro‐chemically influenced reactions, which were seemingly unimaginable. In this review, we have categorized a variety of techniques using various types of selenocyanate regents and their applications in the last decades, focusing on multiple catalysts for the preparation of organic selenocyanates and their derivatives.