Recent developments in green approaches for sustainable synthesis of indole-derived scaffolds.

An important issue to discover biological structures is the design of sustainable, safe, clean, cost-effective, excellent efficient synthetic reactions, and minimal energy consumption to provide structural diversity compounds with interesting biological properties. Among five-membered nitrogen-containing heterocyclic compounds, indole-containing scaffolds are heterocyclic structures found in abundance in natural products and various synthetic compounds, which have received remarkable attention in recent years due to their therapeutic and pharmaceutical properties and valuable role in the process of drug discovery. Indoles can be synthesized by various procedures although most of these procedures have their own restrictions and drawbacks such as performing the reaction in a toxic solvent, need of transition-metal catalysts, and amount of waste solvents. Due to the medicinal importance of indole and the need for green methods of drug synthesis, this review highlights the latest green synthetic methods leading to the formation of indole-containing compounds focusing on the past 4 years with typical examples. This review is divided into two sections: green solvents and green techniques that lead to the synthesis of indole-derived scaffolds.