Spotlights on Recent JACS Publications.

作者：A. Hellemans · 发表于：Journal of the American Chemical Society · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1021/jacs.1c12834 · 研究领域：Medicine

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the best known greenhouse gas, famously produced as humanity burns fossil fuels. Precisely because it is the end product of combustion, it is also incredibly stablethere is a large energy hill to climb for CO2 to react with anything. Sometimes, though, that hill can be bent. CO2 is known to be used in a number of reactions involving mainly the p-block. But these reactions often end up with a center atom that completes its octet, also known as being non-hypovalent, because the p-block atom forms a strong bond with the oxygen. In fact, reactions with p-block atoms and CO2 where the end result is hypovalent or hypocoordinated are pretty rare. Some groups have had some success with diborenes, but some of the intermediates were elusive. Now, Holger Braunschweig and co-workers have provided some clarity as to which intermediates this reaction goes through (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c00479). They stabilized the diborenes with cyclic alkyl amino carbenes (CAAC) instead of Nheterocyclic carbenes. This swaps up the game, leading to πacceptance of the carbene. Afterward, the team could isolate the parent borylene carbonyl and gathered evidence for basestabilized and base-free oxoboranes, providing precedent that these species are more stable than previously thought. Attabey Rodríguez Benítez