Mononuclear non-heme iron enzymes catalyze a variety of
biologically important reactions involving
dioxygen, and yet, the non-heme ferrous active sites have been
difficult to study by most spectroscopic methods.
A combination of near-infrared (NIR) magnetic circular dichroism
(MCD) and variable-temperature, variable-field (VTVH) MCD spectroscopies has been applied to 24 structurally
defined mononuclear non-heme ferrous
model complexes to rigorously correlate spectral data with geometric
and electronic structure. While general
trends for the excited-state splittings have been predicted by ligand
field theory, these predictions are now
evaluated by systematically studying the NIR MCD spectra of a series of
high-spin (S = 2) ferrous models
with a wide range of coordination numbers and geometries. VTVH MCD
spectroscopy is used to probe ground-state electronic structure, and a complete MCD intensity expression for
non-Kramers systems that includes
z-polarization, ℬ-terms, and excited states has been
derived. This expression has been applied to these
model
complexes to determine signs of the zero-field splitting and to obtain
ground-state spin-Hamiltonian parameters,
which can be related to ground-state ligand field splittings.
These experimental ground-state data are used to
develop the information content available from VTVH MCD, in particular
the ability to probe specific metal−ligand bonding interactions for different coordination environments.
The excited-state ligand field data are
used to construct a set of spectroscopic guidelines which, combined
with the ground-state information, allow
one to clearly determine the coordination number and geometry of an
unknown ferrous center, with the exception
of only a few ambiguous cases. Additionally, the MCD data provide
insight into the origin of the MCD
𝒞-term intensities and signs for low-symmetry ferrous centers.
The results obtained through these model
studies now provide the basis for investigating ferrous active sites of
non-heme iron enzymes to probe the
geometric and electronic structure of a site with respect to oxygen
reactivity and understanding how differences
in structure correlate with differences in reactivity.