Research - Historical background

The group dedicated to the study of the Se and Te chemistry at the IQ-USP originated in the investigations by Professors H. Rheinboldt and H. Hauptmann who set up the chemistry studies at the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934. Hauptmann was the PhD advisor to Marcelo de Moura Campos, who, during his PhD studies at the beginning of the 1950s, developed methods to prepare thioketals from carbonyl compounds. This class of compounds became extremely important in the 1960s and 1970s when D. Seebach developed the Umpolung concept based in the thioketals chemistry. H. Rheinboldt directed the PhD thesis of Nicola Petragnani, also during the 1950s, and died before the Petragnani’s thesis defense, which was concerned with tellurium chemistry. During the 1950s Marcelo de Moura Campos spent one year at the laboratory of Professor Arnold at the University of Minnesota, studding the lactonization of unsaturated carboxylic acids promoted by halogens. Upon his return to Brazil, Nicola Petragnani was hired to be his assistant. This association resulted in a systematic study of the interaction of selenium and tellurium reagents with organic substrates. The first important reaction resulting from this partnership was the seleno- and tellurolactonizations, analogous to those studied by Professor de Moura Campos in Minnesota. With the selenoxide syn elimination discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, the seleno-cyclization of unsaturated substrates became synthetically useful, and has been extensively studied by K. C. Nicolaou Nowadays; this reaction is widely used in organic synthesis.

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