UC Berkeley

Understanding the interaction between gold and its ligands is essential in exploiting this versatile metal in many areas of chemistry. Organogold chemistry and the reactivity of gold-carbon bonds, particularly in the context of catalysis, have been extensively investigated over the past two decades. Markedly less research has been dedicated to gold-heteroatom bonds. A desire to understand these bonds has resulted in four studies with vastly different goals and conceptual underpinnings, but that are unified by utilizing gold's interaction with X-type heteroatom ligands.