Selenium-based methods in synthetic chemistry have developed rapidly over the past years and are now offering highly useful tools for organic synthesis. Filling the gap for a comprehensive handbook and ready reference, this book covers all modern developments within
the field, including biochemical aspects. The chemistry chapters are organized according to the different reactivities of various selenium
compounds and reagents, with each chapter dealing with a special reaction type.
Also includes a table with 77Se NMR shifts to aid in practical problems.
From the Contents:
* Electrophilic and Nucleophilic Selenium
* Selenium Compounds in Radical Reactions
* Selenium-Stabilized Carbanions
* Selenium Compounds with Valency Higher than Two
* Selenocarbonyls
* Selenoxide Elimination and [2,3]-Sigmatropic Rearrangement
* Selenium Compounds as Ligands and Catalysts
* Biological and Biochemical Aspects of Selenium Compounds

Thomas Wirth is professor of organic chemistry at Cardiff University. After studying chemistry in Bonn and at the Technical University of Berlin, he obtained his PhD in 1992 with Professor S. Blechert. After a postdoctoral stay with Professor K. Fuji at Kyoto University a JSPS fellow, he started his independent research at the University of Basel (Switzerland). In the group of Professor B. Giese he obtained his habilitation
on stereoselective oxidation reactions supported by various scholarships before taking up his current position at Cardiff University in 2000. He was invited as a visiting professor to a number of places including the University of Toronto/Canada (1999), Chuo University in Tokyo/Japan (2000), and Osaka University/Japan (2004) and was awarded the Werner-Prize from the New Swiss Chemical Society (2000). His main
interests of research concern stereoselective electrophilic reactions, oxidative transformations with hypervalent iodine reagents including mechanistic investigations and organic synthesis performed in microreactors.