Got Selenium?

Abstract

'There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen and rhenium'-so begins 'The Elements' song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM), whereby Tom Lehrer (Fig. 1) assiduously deconstructed the many painstaking decades of research effort by scores of scientists in assembling the Periodic Table as primarily based upon the atomic numbers of the elements. Lehrer instead opted for his imaginative rhyme, with its musical meter purloined from the patter song of Major General Stanley ("I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General') as in the Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta 'The Pirates of Penzance'. By some coincidence, however, three of the four named in the first stanza are Group 15 and 16 elements with which I have considerable microbiological research experience. Only one is missing (tellurium). Hence, by futzing with Lehrer's 'libretto' to suit my own needs for this issue of FEMS, I would pose the following introductory re-rearrangement: 'There's antimony, arsenic, selenium, tellurium, and cadmium, and chromium, and calcium and curium'. While this may (or may not) sit well with Mr Lehrer, who at the time of this writing is still living, I hope it does not cause further discomfiture to the collective eternal peace of Professor Dimitri Mendeleev, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Nonetheless, I will use this preface to take departure for the primary subject of this manuscript, namely our efforts on selenium, which is where it all got started.

Keywords: Group V and VI elements; anaerobes; career retrospective; oxyanions; selenium biogeochemistry; selenotrophs.