Synthetic applications of quintuple bonds?

Organic Chemistry Periodically

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I was only vaguely aware that there were organometallic compounds containing quintuple bonds. They do exist, sure, but is there anything synthetically sound you can use them for?

I just came across this article in Chemistry World. A very recent paper of Kempe’s group (Universität Bayreuth, Germany) in Chem. Commun. shows some potentially interesting application for these somewhat exotic highly bonded complexes. They can activate small stable molecules such as CO2 and SO2… Great! But how can you make this quintuple-bonded wonder?

(from ChemistryWorld)

The answer lies in a previous paper of the group in Nature Chem. and it will seem odd to many readers I guess… you have to mix the Cr(II) precursor with two equivalents of KC8, a very powerful reducing agent used in inorganic chemistry (i’ts basically a potassium-graphite mixture). So far, not too practical for synthetic applications…

View original post 10 more words

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s