Thiols and Sulfides as Complexing Agents and Catalysts

INTRODUCTION

What if there were no sulfur? Suppose that although sulfur was in its correct place in the periodic system, Nature through some caprice had failed to provide a supply of the element on earth. Imagine - just a few examples, not everything - a chemistry (and world) without the exquisitely active odor components of grapefruit and oranges, the tears brought about by peeled onions, the reek of garlic, the stench of the skunk, sulfuric acid, thiophene, penicillins, cephalosporins, biotin, the biochemically essential methylations brought about by S-adenosyl methionine, the enormous deposits of wurtzite in, for example, the Harz mountains of Germany, the ferridoxins of electron transfer processes.