Emergence of Ag as a Catalyst of Choice for Fluorination and Trifluoromethylation Reactions

Carbon-fluorine bond being highly polar in nature, its presence in pharmaceutically active molecules has huge impact on their chemical and physical properties. However, fluorine being highly electronegative and small in size, limits its nucleophilicity to the large extent; hence the incorporation of fluorine in the organic molecules is not an easy task. Due to this, demand for a suitable catalyst for fluorination reaction has been raised, which lowers the activation energy of these reactions and makes C-F/CF3 bond formation reaction kinetically more feasible. Silver being a late transition metal catalyst has been efficiently used to catalyze several reactions in the organic chemistry and has the substantial potential to catalyze the fluorination reactions. This Review shows the silver catalyzed fluorination and trifluoromethylation reactions for the synthesis of F/CF3 containing aromatic, aliphatic and heterocyclic compounds. All the sections have been elaborated using general discussion of the method, exploration of substrate scope, insight into the mechanistic studies and the shortcomings of the methods. After reading this Review article the readers can develop a detailed understanding of concept of silver metal catalyzed fluorination and trifluoromethylation reactions which can be explored for synthesizing molecules of biological interest.