Among the various reactions in which selenium serves as a catalytic center, electrophilic selenium catalysis has become an important synthetic tool in catalytic synthesis and has received increasing attention over the past decade due to its unique catalytic advantages such as carbon affinity and redox activity. This catalytic method has also been applied in various rearrangement reactions and can successfully construct a variety of valuable compounds. This review briefly summarizes the research progress of electrophilic selenium catalysis in rearrangement reactions, introducing both nucleophilic rearrangements and [2,3] sigmatropic rearrangements, with a focus on the description of reaction mechanisms, providing references for the design of new selenium-catalyzed reactions.

Key words: electrophilic selenium catalysis, nucleophilic rearrangement, [2,3] σ, rearrangement, organocatalysis