Copper dioxygen complexes trinuclear

In 1996 Stack and co-workers reported an unusual 3 1 (copper 02 stoichiometry) reaction between a mononuclear copper(I) complex of a A-permethylated (lR,2R)-cyclohexanediamine ligand with dioxygen. The end product of this reaction, stable at only low temperatures (X-ray structure at —40 °C) is a discrete, mixed-valence trinuclear copper cluster (1), with two Cu11 and a Cu111 center (Cu-Cu 2.641 and 2.704 A).27 Its spectroscopic and magnetic behavior were also investigated in detail. The relevance of this synthetic complex to the reduction of 02 at the trinuclear active sites of multicopper oxidases4-8 was discussed. Once formed, it exhibits moderate thermal stability, decomposed by a non-first-order process in about 3h at —10 °C. In the presence of trace water, the major isolated product was the bis(/i-hydroxo)dicopper(II) dimer (2). 

The reaction of dioxygen with laccase or ascorbate oxidase was reviewed in Section IX and in Messerschmidt et al. (74), where the possible binding modes of dioxygen to binuclear and trinuclear copper centers are discussed. A novel mode of dioxygen binding to a binuclear copper complex was found in a compound synthesized by Kitajima et al. (165). The complex contains peroxide in the mode, i.e., side-on between... 

Multicopper oxidases are typically active in the catalytic one-electron oxidation of a variety of diphenolic, polyphenolic, enediolic, and aminophe-nolic substrates 1,53,166,167). The mechanism of these reactions is complex and, as discussed in Section I, it involves a sequence of four one-electron oxidations of substrate molecules. The radical products of these reactions undergo dismutation, as shown in Scheme 21 for the oxidation of ascorbate to semidehydroascorbate radical 168,169). The substrate binds to the enzymes close to type 1 Cu, whereas the trinuclear cluster is only accessible to dioxygen, or other small molecules. This situation is clearly difficult to reproduce in a model system and for this reason the type of model oxidation reactions that have been studied so far using synthetic trinuclear copper complexes is more related to the activity of type 3 Cu enzymes than multicopper oxidases. Nevertheless, such trinuclear complexes open new perspectives in stereoselective catalysis, because one of the metal centers... 

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