Starch nanoparticles as a bio-nanocatalyst in synthesis of diheteroaryl thioethers

Nanostarch is shown to be a highly efficient, eco-friendly and heterogenous organocatalyst for the synthesis of the diheteroaryl thioethers via one-pot reaction of methylcarbonyls, thiourea and iodine in DMSO. This method offers significant advantages such as available starting materials, higher purity and excellent yield of products, very easy reaction conditions and absence of any tedious purification. Furthermore, because of employing eco-friendly catalyst without using transition metal catalysts, this novel method emerges as a green-approach leading to less harmful residues. Moreover, a mechanism was proposed to rationalize the reaction and the role of starch nanoparticles was also investigated in these transformations.