Recent Catalytic Advances in the Synthesis of Organic Symmetric Disulfides

Organic symmetric disulfides have been broadly studied in various fields such as synthetic intermediates for various organic transformations, agro-chemicals, biochemistry, pharmacological chemistry, industrial polymers, peptidomimetics, self-assembled monolayers (SAMs), etc. Owing to versatile applications, the search and development of efficient, environmentally friendly, mild and inexpensive methods for the preparation of organic disulfides play an important role in the organic functional group transformations. Various aspects of the S–S bond formation are available in some books on organic functional group transformations, as well as two review articles that have been published in the years 2008 and 2014 highlighting the developments of disulfide bond formation using a variety of reagents. However, investigations on new catalytic methods are being regularly reported and new types of disulfides are synthesized. The present review has attempted to systematically summarize recent catalytic advances in the process of S–S bond formation with a major focus since 2014 on highlighting mechanistic considerations, scope, advantages, and limitations. This review does not include patent literature.