Water oxidation catalysis constitutes the bottleneck for the development of energy-conversion schemes based on sunlight. To date, state-of-the-art homogeneous water oxidation catalysis is performed efficiently with expensive, toxic and earth-scarce transition metals, but 3d metal-based catalysts are much less established. Here we show that readily available, environmentally benign iron coordination complexes catalyse homogeneous water oxidation to give O(2), with high efficiency during a period of hours. Turnover numbers >350 and >1,000 were obtained using cerium ammonium nitrate at pH 1 and sodium periodate at pH 2, respectively. Spectroscopic monitoring of the catalytic reactions, in combination with kinetic studies, show that high valent oxo-iron species are responsible for the O-O forming event. A systematic study of iron complexes that contain a broad family of neutral tetradentate organic ligands identifies first-principle structural features to sustain water oxidation catalysis. Iron-based catalysts described herein open a novel strategy that could eventually enable sustainable artificial photosynthetic schemes.

Oxoiron(IV) species have been found to act as the oxidants in the catalytic cycles of several mononuclear nonheme iron enzymes that activate dioxygen. To gain insight into the factors that govern the oxidative reactivity of such complexes, a series of five synthetic S = 1 [FeIV(O)(LN5)]2+ complexes has been characterized with respect to their spectroscopic and electrochemical properties as well as their relative abilities to carry out oxo transfer and hydrogen atom abstraction. The Fe=O units in these five complexes are supported by neutral pentadentate ligands having a combination of pyridine and tertiary amine donors but with different ligand frameworks. Characterization of the five complexes by X-ray absorption spectroscopy reveals Fe=O bonds of ca. 1.65 Å in length that give rise to the intense 1s→3d pre-edge features indicative of iron centers with substantial deviation from centrosymmetry. Resonance Raman studies show that the five complexes exhibit ν(Fe=O) modes at 825–841 cm−1. Spectropotentiometric experiments in acetonitrile with 0.1 M water reveal that the supporting pentadentate ligands modulate the E1/2(IV/III) redox potentials with values ranging from 0.83 to 1.23 V vs. Fc, providing the first electrochemical determination of the E1/2(IV/III) redox potentials for a series of oxoiron(IV) complexes. The 0.4-V difference in potential may arise from differences in the relative number of pyridine and tertiary amine donors on the LN5 ligand and in the orientations of the pyridine donors relative to the Fe=O bond that are enforced by the ligand architecture. The rates of oxo-atom transfer (OAT) to thioanisole correlate linearly with the increase in the redox potentials, reflecting the relative electrophilicities of the oxoiron(IV) units. However this linear relationship does not extend to the rates of hydrogen-atom transfer (HAT) from 1,3-cyclohexadiene (CHD), 9,10-dihydroanthracene (DHA), and benzyl alcohol, suggesting that the HAT reactions are not governed by thermodynamics alone. This study represents the first investigation to compare the electrochemical and oxidative properties of a series of S = 1 FeIV=O complexes with different ligand frameworks and sheds some light on the complexities of the reactivity of the oxoiron(IV) unit.

A nonheme iron catalyst catalyzed stereoselective oxidation of alkanes with H2O2 with remarkable efficiency and exhibiting an unprecedented high incorporation of water into the oxidized products. The present results challenge the canonical description of oxygenases, the standard oxo-hydroxo tautomerism that applies to heme systems and serves as a precedent for alternative pathways for the oxidation of hydrocarbons at nonheme iron oxygenases.

Since fullerenes are available in macroscopic quantities from fullerene soot, large efforts have been geared toward designing efficient strategies to obtain highly pure fullerenes, which can be subsequently applied in multiple research fields. Here we present a supramolecular nanocage synthesized by metal-directed self-assembly, which encapsulates fullerenes of different sizes. Direct experimental evidence is provided for the 1:1 encapsulation of C 60 , C 70 , C 76 , C 78 and C 84 , and solid state structures for the host-guest adducts with C 60 and C 70 have been obtained using X-ray synchrotron radiation. Furthermore, we design a washingbased strategy to exclusively extract pure C 60 from a solid sample of cage charged with a mixture of fullerenes. These results showcase an attractive methodology to selectively extract C 60 from fullerene mixtures, providing a platform to design tuned cages for selective extraction of higher fullerenes. The solid-phase fullerene encapsulation and liberation represent a twist in host-guest chemistry for molecular nanocage structures.

Check for cavities: An exceptionally active nonheme iron catalyst employs H2O2 as an oxidant for the stereospecific hydroxylation of alkanes (see scheme). The iron site is located in a chemically robust cavity made up by the ligands.

The non-haem iron complex α-[FeII(CF3SO3)2(mcp)] (mcp = (N,N′-dimethyl-N,N′-bis(2-pyridylmethyl)-1,2-cis-diaminocyclohexane) reacts with CeIV to oxidize water to O2, representing an iron-based functional model for the oxygen evolving complex of photosystem II. Here we trap an intermediate, characterized by cryospray ionization high resolution mass spectrometry and resonance Raman spectroscopy, and formulated as [(mcp)FeIV(O) (μ-O)CeIV(NO3)3]+, the first example of a well-characterized inner-sphere complex to be formed in cerium(IV)-mediated water oxidation. The identification of this reactive FeIV–O–CeIV adduct may open new pathways to validate mechanistic notions of an analogous MnV–O–CaII unit in the oxygen evolving complex that is responsible for carrying out the key O–O bond forming step.

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The present study provides mechanistic details of a mild aromatic C-H activation effected by a copper(II) center ligated in a triazamacrocylic ligand, affording equimolar amounts of Cu III -aryl species and Cu I as reaction products. At low-temperatures the Cu II complex 1 forms a 3-center 3-electron C-H⋯Cu II interaction, identified by pulse-EPR spectroscopy and supported by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. C-H bond cleavage is coupled with copper oxidation, as a Cu III -aryl product 2 is formed. This reaction proceeds to completion at 273 K within minutes through either a copper disproportionation reaction or, alternatively, an even faster reaction with one-equivalent of TEMPO (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxyl), quantitatively yielding 2. Kinetic studies of both reactions strongly implicate a rate-limiting proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) as the key C-H activation step, a mechanism that does not conform to either the C-H activation mechanism in a Ni II analogue or to any previously proposed C-H activation mechanisms.