Green Chemistry as a Versatile Technique for the Synthesis of Benzimidazole Derivatives: Review

“Green chemistry” is the newand rapid emerging field of chemistry. It involves the utilization of a set of principles that reducesor eliminates the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture and application of chemical products.Microwave induced organic reaction enhancement (MORE) is a simple, clean, fast, efficientandeconomical method for thesynthesis of organic molecules and has emerged as a tool towards green chemistry. This technique canreduce the time ofchemical reaction from hours to minutes. Conventional methods of synthetic reactions need longer heating time, elaborate andtedious apparatus set up which result in higher cost and environmental pollution. The reaction rateof microwave induced organicreaction increases ten to thousand times andthe yield of the product increases by 10-30 % compared to that by the conventionalmethods. As we know benzimidazole derivatives have been reported to have a wide range of pharmacological and biochemicalactivities; viz antifungal, antibacterial, antiviralanthelmintic, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, anti-neoplastic, depressive, hypnotic,anti-pyretic and anti-spasmolytic.Thus, we became interested in the study of synthesis of substituted benzimidazoles by greensynthesis techniques and furthermore to studytheir biological activities.