Analytical Applications of Vibrational Spectroscopy in Bioorganometallic Chemistry

Abstract

An organometallic compound strictly contains at least one metal-carbon bond, but nowadays, compounds containing an organic moiety linked to a metal through oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., are also usually considered as organometallics or metal-organics. It is about 45 years since the famous discovery of ferrocene, Cp₂Fe (Cp = η⁵-C₅H₅), and the birth of organometallic chemistry. In the interim, organometallic chemistry has become a mature field with several major journals being devoted solely to it:, among them, Organometallics, Journal of Organometallic Chemistry and Applied Organometallic Chemistry. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the interactions of organometallic compounds with biomolecules and the new field of bioorganometallic chemistry has opened up [1]. Among the earliest known examples of bioorganometallic compounds are the metallocene dihalides, (Cp₂MX₂; M = Ti, Zr, Hf, Mo, V; X = Cl, Br), which are active antitumor agents that are presumed to coordinate to DNA in a manner similar to, cis-Pt(NH₃)₂Cl₂ (cis-platin), in which the two halides are displaced from the coordination sphere of the metal by the N atoms of two nearby amino acids. Several areas in which bioorganometallic chemistry plays an important role will now be described, with particular emphasis on the role of vibrational spectroscopy in this work.