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NUCLEOPHILIC REACTIVITY

Changing the gold standard

Nature Chemistry volume 11, pages 199–200 (2019)Cite this article

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Gold — long presumed to be an inert metal — has been increasingly shaking this image over the past couple of decades, mostly through electrophilic behaviour. Now, a two-coordinate gold complex has been shown to exhibit nucleophilic reactivity, with the insertion of CO2 into its polarized Auδ−–Alδ+ bond.

First introduced in the 1970s by Dieter Seebach and Elias James Corey, the concept of umpolung is a cornerstone in organic chemistry. It describes the polarity inversion of an atom or a functional group, resulting in reactivity with an electronic flow inverse to that normally encountered. Now, using such an umpolung strategy, Jose Goicoechea, Simon Aldridge and co-workers have coaxed a gold complex into displaying nucleophilic reactivity in solution1.

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Fig. 1: Synthesis and reactivity of the gold complex 2.

References

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  1. Laboratoire Hétérochimie Fondamentale et Appliquée, CNRS/Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Didier Bourissou

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  1. Didier Bourissou
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Correspondence to Didier Bourissou.

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Bourissou, D. Changing the gold standard. Nature Chem 11, 199–200 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0223-z

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