With its impressive features, gold has led to completely new reaction types in recent years, which in turn have strongly influenced both
organic catalysis and material science. Other fields where a significant amount of new results has been obtained include nanotechnology,
self assembly/supramolecular systems and biochemical/medicinal chemistry. As a result, gold is one of the hottest topics in catalysis at
the moment, with an increasing amount of research being carried out in this field.
While focusing on homogeneous catalysis, this monograph also covers the main applications in heterogeneous catalysis. Following
a look at the gold-catalyzed addition of heteroatom nucleophiles to alkynes, it goes on to discuss gold-catalyzed additions to allenes and
alkenes, gold-catalyzed benzannulations, cycloisomerization and rearrangement reactions, as well as oxidation and reduction reactions.
The whole is finished off with a section on gold-catalyzed aldol and related reactions and the application of gold-catalyzed reactions to natural
product synthesis.
Of interest to synthetic chemists and inorganic chemists, as well as organic chemists working in homogeneous catalysis, physical and
technical chemists.

Stephen Hashmi is professor for Organic Chemistry at University of Heidelberg, Germany. He obtained his academic degrees from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, after his postdoctoral studies with Barry M. Trost at Stanford University he started his Habilitation at Freie Universitat Berlin with Johann Mulzer. During that time he followed Prof. Mulzer to Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Franfurt and Universitat Wien. He then returned to Frankfurt to finish his Habilitation. After the stations at University of Tasmania, Australia, Universitat Marburg, and Universitat Stuttgart, he was appointed a full professorship at Heidelberg University, where he is also involved in the Catalysis Research Laboratory (CaRLa). He received a number of awards, including a Karl-Zieger fellowship, the ORCHEM prize for natural scientists and the Hector research award.
F. Dean Toste was born in Terceira, Azores, Portugal but soon moved to Toronto Canada. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry from the University of Toronto, Canada where he worked with Prof. Ian W. J. Still. In 1995, he began his doctoral studies at Stanford
University under the direction of Professor Barry M. Trost. Following postdoctoral studies with Professor Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and Professor in 2009.
Professor Toste?s honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Cope Scholar Award and the E. J. Corey Award from the American Chemical Society, BASF Catalysis Award, the OMCOS and Thieme Award from IUPAC, the Merck Award from the Royal Society of
Chemistry, the Mukaiyama Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award and numerous awards from the pharmaceutical industry.