Block-Group 13 Metal Bonds

It was in the 1970s that the first compounds containing direct bonds between transition metals and Group 13 elements were structurally characterized these include In[Co(CO)4]3 (the synthesis 

More recently, the focus has shifted toward the study of novel structural types and bonding motifs. 

M)] [189] (M = Ga, In), which feature a Group 13 metal bridging two transition metals. Both these and more traditional diyl systems find useful comparison with the increasing number of systems featuring boron in superficially similar bonding modes [190-192]. 

Transition metal bonds to Group 13 elements have been the subject of several extensive review artides [17,183-185,199-201]. In this section, a brief overview of the key routes employed to access such systems will be presented, together with a discussion of the nature of the metal-metal bonding. 

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In contrast to these adducts in which the boratabenzene ring is bound ti to the main-group metal, reaction of [C5H5B-Me]Li with PbCl2 affords a bent-sandwich complex, Pbfi/ -CsI LBMeh.31 This report provided the first structural characterization of an r 6-bonding mode to a p-block metal. Reaction of Pb(Ti6-C5H5BMe)2 with a Lewis base such as bipyridine leads to a complex wherein the bipyridine is bound in the pseudoequatorial plane. 

Up to the end of 1972, more than 350 compounds containing silicon-transition-metal bonds had been synthesized, but their distribution among the d-block elements is by no means uniform. It can be inferred that the stability of such complexes decreases from right to left in a transition series and with increasing oxidation state of the transition metal. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that no silyl derivatives of the vanadium group have been prepared and that there are few nickel or palladium derivatives, as can be seen in the complete list of compounds given in Section 6. 

Usually decarboxylation is accomplished by heating the acids above their melting points, often in the presence of a copper-chromium catalyst. Imidazole-4,5-dicarboxylic acid can be monodecarboxylated by heating its monoanilide imidazole- and benzimidazole-2-carboxylic acids decarboxylate very readily indeed, so readily that the carboxyl function makes a useful blocking group in metallation procedures (see Scheme 7.2.1) [3-5]. A potentially useful method of preparation of imidazole-4-carboxylic acid derivatives heats the 4,5-dicarboxylic acid (2) with acetic anhydride to form (1), which is essentially an azolide and very prone to nucleophilic attack which cleaves the nitrogen-carbonyl bond (Scheme 8.3.1). With methanol the methyl ester (3) is formed with hydrazines the 4-hydrazides (4) result [6]. 

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