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Cracking carbon-carbon bonds
The team thinks a series of C-H insertions leads to a complex where the C-C bond can be cleaved © G Parkin/Nature
Chemists in the US have discovered a tungsten complex that can break a strong carbon-carbon bond in an aromatic ring. Coaxing such unreactive C-C bonds to participate in chemical reactions could open up whole new avenues of organometallic chemistry for synthesis and the petrochemical industry.
Ged Parkin and Aaron Sattler at Columbia University, New York, were originally searching for molybdenum complexes that could cleave the carbon-nitrogen bonds of heteroaromatic ring compounds. The idea was to improve hydrodenitrogenation - the process by which nitrogen is removed from fossil fuel mixtures. 'We'd had some success with molybdenum, but we'd never managed to cleave the C-N bond,' says Parkin. More...
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/January/27011002.asp
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