A practical method to synthesize α‐alkylated arylacetonitriles from arylacetonitriles and alcohols without using any expensive transition metal complexes is demonstrated here. Following this base‐catalysed sustainable procedure, various arylacetonitriles were successfully alkylated with different alcohols. The practical applicability of this protocol was extended by one‐pot synthesis of important carboxylic acid derivatives.

A tandem synthesis of quinazolinones from 2-aminobenzonitriles is demonstrated here by using an aliphatic alcohol–water system. For this transformation, a cheap and easily available cobalt salt and P­(CH2CH2PPh2)3 (PP3) ligand were employed. The substrate scope, scalability, and synthesis of natural products exhibited the vitality of this protocol.

Functionalized bipyridine based Ru(II) complex catalyzed tandem synthesis of quinazolinones from 2-aminobenzonitriles is reported here utilizing aliphatic alcohol–water system.

In last two decades alcohol has drawn a special attention as a building blocks due to its abundance, low cost and less toxic nature which can be derived from various sustainable resources. By dehydrogenation of alcohol, aldehyde/ketone can be easily accessed which can be further coupled with several nucleophiles for the construction of complex molecules. Among the various strategies, metalligand cooperation is a powerful and efficient tool for the utilization of alcohol to synthesize variety of value-added products. Numerous alkyl phosphine based bifunctional complexes are well-known in the literature for the alcohol dehydrogenative coupling reactions. However, the presence of alkyl phosphine moiety and air and moisture sensitive nature of the metal complexes hinder their broad application in catalysis. In this minireview, we highlighted air and moisture stable, metal-ligand cooperative 5d, 4d and 3d metal-based complexes which were effectively utilized to fabricate different value-added compounds by alcohol dehydrogenative coupling reactions.