Current Organic Chemistry - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2016

Electrophilic Selenium, Sulfur and Tellurium reagents are widely applied in a number of chemo, regio and stereospecific transformations for the installation of new functional groups in organic electron rich substrates as well as the synthesis of heterocyclic scaffolds. The most recent review articles are here currently updated demonstrating the continuously growing interest in this kind of reagents.

The review describes reactions of selenium and tellurium halides with alkenes and alkynes leading to useful organochalcogen compounds with main focus on the literature of last decade. The reactions of selenium dichloride and dibromide - new electrophilic reagents, which have been recently introduced in organic synthesis, along with the reactions of "classic" electrophilic reagents selenium and tellurium tetrahalides are discu Read More

This review presents synthetic procedures applied to the preparation of chiral (mainly optically active) hypervalent chalcogenuranes. The stereoisomerization mechanisms of hypervalent derivatives of sulfur, selenium and tellurium and their selected interconversions are also presented.

A tetrahydroselenophene (selenolane) skeleton, which is a five-membered heterocycle containing a selenium atom, has attracted increasing interest due to the significant stability and the high redox activity. Several water- soluble tetrahydroselenophene derivatives having one or two hydrophilic functional groups (e.g., OH and NH2) have been synthesized and applied to biological phenomena relevant to the redox hom Read More

Organoselenium compounds are molecules with important potential therapeutic applications. Seleniumcontaining 5-membered heterocycles have emerged as an important class of biological compounds. In the past five years, several articles related to the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of these compounds have been published. These heterocycles have been applied as antioxidants, cytotoxic agents, apoptosis Read More

Organoselenium compounds can reduce H2O2 and organic hydroperoxides mimicking the antioxidant activity of glutathione peroxidase (GPx). This catalytic process reduces the peroxides, which play a key role in oxidative stress, thus inhibiting their harmful action. Thus, it is not surprising that a lot of effort has been devoted toward the synthesis and design of numerous GPx mimics, which, nevertheless, show minor efficiency wh Read More

Mitochondria are key organelles involved, among others, in the ATP synthesis. Mitochondrial physiology is strictly dependent on its integrity. Since ATP synthesis is necessary to many of the physiological processes in cells, changes in mitochondrial physiology and/or integrity are of particular importance to cell activity. Mitochondrial dysfunction could lead to apoptotic cell death, which is often associated with the release of “mi Read More

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in natural and synthetic polysulfanes and their potential uses in Medicine and Agriculture. Whilst the chemistry and biochemistry of these organic sulfur compounds is slowly emerging and biological applications are being put into practice, their inorganic equivalents, the hydrogen polysulfides, have attracted little attention so far. Recently, studies conducted in the field of hydroge Read More

Selenium plays its physiological chemistry in mammalian living cells as the selenol group of a selenocysteinyl residue found in few numbers of selenoproteins. These proteins have antioxidant properties and catalyze redox reactions, for instance, the selenol-mediated decomposition of peroxides (glutathione peroxidase catalyzed reactions) or the selenol-thiol-mediated reduction of disulfide bonds (the thioredoxin reduct Read More