Gold highlights at the 10th International Conference on Heteroatom Chemistry (ICHAC-10), in Uji, Kyoto, Japan, 20–25 May 2012

Abstract

There were over 370 participants attending this meeting, coming from diverse fields of heteroatom chemistry. Most presentations were from Japan; however, around 90 participants were from other countries (including China, Korea, Taiwan, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, UK, Spain, Portugal, USA and Canada), being the majority from universities and research institutes. Gold-related subjects had an importance presence, showing that research on gold keeps increasing all over the world. The synthesis of different gold complexes, the use of gold compounds as catalysts for heterocycle formation and gold nanoparticles or gold electrodes for several applications were referred. A brief description is indicated below. The plenary lecture (PL3) of Wolf du Mont (Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany) dealt with “Nitrogen and oxygen-bridged bifunctional phosphaalkene ligands”. N–Si bond cleavage of the N-silylimino-bridged bis-phosphaalkene [(iPrMe2Si)2C0P]2NSiMe3 with chlorides of Ag , Au and Rh leads to complexes of the 5c-6π-heteropentadiene imidobisphosphanaalkene anion [1]. Figure 1 shows an imidobisphosphaalkene gold complex. In his plenary lecture (PL5), dealing with “Transition metal-catalysed synthesis of heterocycles proceeding with migration of heteroatom groups”, Vladimir Gevorgyan (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) spoke about novel efficient transition metal-catalysed methodologies for synthesis of multi-substituted carboand heterocycles by incorporation of migrating step(s) in the cyclisation cascade. It was found that in the presence of Cu, Ag and Au catalysts, a number of groups, such as X (X0I, Br, Cl), RS−, SiR3, etc., could undergo 1,2or 1,3-migration. An example referred in a recent publication of the speaker shows an interesting example [2], as a double migratory cascade reaction of αhalogen-substituted propargylic phosphates to produce highly functionalized 1,3-dienes has been developed. This transformation features 1,3-phosphatyloxy group migration followed by 1,3-shifts of bromine and chlorine as well as the