Commoners and ‘Uncommoners’

Because we meet them daily in various forms, we tend to think of metals as common. However, ‘common’ is a relative term– iron may be more common than gold in terms of availability in the Earth’s crust, but gold is itself more common than rhenium. Even for the fairly well-known elements of the first row of the d block of the Periodic Table, abundance in

the Earth’s crust varies significantly, from iron (41000ppm) to cobalt (20ppm); moreover, what we think of as ‘common’ metals, like copper (50ppm abundance) and zinc (75ppm abundance), are really hardly that. Availability of an element is not driven by how much is present on average in the Earth’s crust, of course, but by other factors such as its existence in sufficiently high concentrations in accessible ore bodies and its commercial value and applicability . Iron, more abundant than the sum of all other d-block elements, is mined from exceedingly rich ore deposits and is of major commercial significance. Rhenium, the rarest transition metal naturally available, is a minor by-product of some ore bodies where other valuable metals are the primary target, and in any case has limited commercial application. Nevertheless, our technology has advanced sufficiently that there is not one metal available naturally on Earth that is not isolated in some amount or form, and for which some commercial applications do not now exist. Even synthetic elements are available and applicable. Complexes of an isotope of technetium, the only d-block element with no stable isotopes that consequently does not exist in the Earth’s crust and must be made in a nuclear reactor, are important in medical-ray imaging; in fact, sufficient technetium is produced so that it may be considered as accessible as its rare, naturally available, partner element rhenium. As another example, an isotope of the synthetic f-block actinoid element americium forms the core of the ionization mechanism operating in the sensor of household smoke detectors. These observations have one obvious impact on coordination chemistry– every metallic element in the Periodic Table is accessible and in principle able to be studied and each offers a suite of unique properties and behaviour. As a consequence, they are in one sense all now ‘common’; what distinguishes them are their relative cost and the amounts available. In the end, it has been such commercially-driven considerations that have led to a concentration on the coordination chemistry of the more available and applicable lighter elements of the transition metals, from vanadium to zinc. Of course Nature, again, has made similar choices much earlier, as most metalloenzymes employ light transition elements at their active sites.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Meeting More Metals - Bridging Ligands

More Teeth Stronger Bite - Polydentates

Greed is Good– Polydentate Ligands The Simple Chelate

Monodentate Ligands– The Simple Type Basic Binders

Ligands with More Bite– Denticity

Different Tribes– Donor Group Variation

Do I Look Big on That?– Chelate Ring Size

Putting the Bite on Metals– Chelation

Making Attachments– Coordination

The Road Ahead

Natural or Made-to-Measure Complexes

Metals in Contrived Environments