Where gold meets a hydrogen bond?

This is a short survey of the area of the hydrogen bonding where the noble and coinage metal gold enters its manifold of the proton acceptors. It is largely focused on the nonconventional hydrogen bonds that are formed in the complexes of the auride anion Au- with HF, (HF)(2), H2O, (H2O)(2), NH3, and (NH3)(2), as mostly experimentally investigated to date. A thorough comparison of the experimental and computational data on these nonconventional hydrogen bonds is the main rnotif of the present work. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.