The photoinduced electron transfer (PET) reactions of silyl ethers and their application

Photocatalyzed organic reaction has been greatly developed and applied at the last 20 years, because photochemical synthesis is an efficiently green synthetic strategy, featuring simple operation, high chemical selectivity and low price etc. Meanwhile, organosilicon reagents have been widely used and developed in the field of organic synthesis since they were discovered. Photocatalyzed reactions of organosilicon compounds, especially silyl ethers, have taken advantages of mild condition, good selectivity and atom economy and been performed in synthesizing silicon-containing molecules and carbon skeleton molecules which were difficultly acquired by the traditional approaches. This review mainly introduced the reaction of silyl enol ethers, cyclopropyl silyl ethers, silyl acetals, silyl ethers and ketene silyl acetals via PET triggered by sensitizers/co-sensitizers, photocatalysts, electron donor-acceptor (EDA) complex, no photocatalysts and sensitizers and so on.