Coordinated diimine ligands, oxidation reaction products

The question of which pathway is preferred was very recently addressed for several diimine-chelated platinum complexes (93). It was convincingly shown for dimethyl complexes chelated by a variety of diimines that the metal is the kinetic site of protonation. In the system under investigation, acetonitrile was used as the trapping ligand L (see Fig. 1) which reacted with the methane complex B to form the elimination product C and also reacted with the five-coordinate alkyl hydride species D to form the stable six-coordinate complex E (93). An increase in the concentration of acetonitrile led to increased yields of the methyl (hydrido)platinum(IV) complex E relative to the platinum(II) product C. It was concluded that the equilibration between the species D and B and the irreversible and associative1 reactions of these species with acetonitrile occur at comparable rates such that the kinetic product of the protonation is more efficiently trapped at higher acetonitrile concentrations. Thus, in these systems protonation occurs preferentially at platinum and, by the principle of microscopic reversibility, this indicates that C-H activation with these systems occurs preferentially via oxidative addition (93). 

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