Recent Advances in Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) Used as a Multipurpose Reactant

Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is not only a common and cheap aprotic polar solvent with low toxicity but also serves as an efficient and multipurpose reactant, and has widely been used in organic synthesis. DMSO as an important precursor can effectively introduce a broad range of functional fragments into organic molecules, such as -Me, -CH, -CH2, -SMe2, - CH2SMe, -CH2SOMe, -SMe, -SO2Me, -SOMe or O substituents, and serves as a mild oxidant in organic transformations. Many significant achievements based on DMSO as a synthon in synthetic chemistry have rapidly been made over the past several years. To help researchers further understand the recent advances in the field, the review summarizes the applications of DMSO as carbon, sulfur, and oxygen sources and its use as the dual synthon in synthetic transformations.