<![CDATA[Sitting on a benzene ring]]>

<![CDATA[Sitting on a benzene ring]]>I do not, in all honesty, have a habit of reading Inorganic Chemistry, but Chris Uyeda’s account of a fascinating dinickel system has attracted my attention. I met Chris on a trip to Purdue University last Fall and was impressed by his ideas in the area of bimetallic reactivity. Several days ago I came across a paper from the Uyeda team, describing a really cool bis(nickel) system and its capacity to interact with benzene. The most interesting thing here is how redox-active donor ligands are called upon to stabilize nickel-based complexes  in unusual oxidation states.  In fact, a wide range of oxidation states (5 in this case) can be accessed by varying the π-system of the ligand. There are many applications one can imagine for this bimetallic framework in catalysis (particularly in multielectron  redox reactions), which is something I am sure we will see in due course.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic5020785

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