Reagents for Silicon-Mediated Organic Synthesis

Book excerpt: Over the last three decades the importance of organosilicon chemistry has greatly increased because it has opened a number of new synthetic strategies. Silicon reagents are usually low-cost, versatile and allow a wide range of reactions. This is the first Handbook to compile essential Silicon containing reagents and makes use of the leading reagent database e-EROS. Another hot volume in the series Handbooks of Reagents for Organic Synthesis, this is a must-have resource for all synthetic chemists working in drug development and medicinal chemistry. For the selection the Editor focussed on three key synthetic approaches with the greatest impact: 1. Use of silicon as a 'temporary tether' by unifying a reactive pair of functional groups and taking advantage of their template-biased intramolecular cyclization. 2. The specific use of the silane functionality as a hetero t-butyl group, often colloquially referred to as the use of silicon as a 'fat proton'. 3. The use of the Brook rearrangement as an 'anion relay stratagem'. A new feature in this Handbook is the reagent finder, an alphabetically organized lookup table arranged by organic functionality and specific structure of the silicon atom to which it is bound.