Abstract

During the last decades, indium chemistry has attracted considerable attentions from synthetic community and has found widespread applications in organic synthesis. Compared to many other commonly used metals (such as Li, Al, Mg, and Zn), indium is insensitive to water and air, allowing the operation of indium-mediated organic transformations in aqueous media. In addition, its mildness also permits indium-mediated reactions to proceed with better functional group tolerance and sometimes better chemoselectivity. In this review, a wide variety of the applications of indium in organic synthesis are summarized, with a special emphasis on reactions which have been reported recently, such as allylation reaction, alkylation reaction, cross-dehydrogenative coupling (CDC), aldehyde and enone cross-coupling reaction, Prins-type cyclization, radical cyclization, propargylation/allenylation of imines, and Diels-Alder reaction.

Keywords: Indium, organoindium reagent, aqueous media, organic synthesis.

Graphical Abstract