Redox-active ligands have evolved from being considered spectroscopic curiosities - creating ambiguity about formal oxidation states in metal complexes - to versatile and useful tools to expand on the reactivity of (transition) metals or to even go beyond what is generally perceived possible. This review focusses on metal complexes containing either catechol, o-aminophenol or o-phenylenediamine type ligands. These ligands have opened up a new area of chemistry for metals across the periodic table. The portfolio of ligand-based reactivity invoked by these redox-active entities will be discussed. This ranges from facilitating oxidative additions upon d(0) metals or cross coupling reactions with cobalt(iii) without metal oxidation state changes - by functioning as an electron reservoir - to intramolecular ligand-to-substrate single-electron transfer to create a reactive substrate-centered radical on a Pd(ii) platform. Although the current state-of-art research primarily consists of stoichiometric and exploratory reactions, several notable reports of catalysis facilitated by the redox-activity of the ligand will also be discussed. In conclusion, redox-active ligands containing catechol, o-aminophenol or o-phenylenediamine moieties show great potential to be exploited as reversible electron reservoirs, donating or accepting electrons to activate substrates and metal centers and to enable new reactivity with both early and late transition as well as main group metals.

Transition-metal-based molecular complexes are a class of catalyst materials for electrochemical CO2 reduction to CO that can be rationally designed to deliver high catalytic performance. One common mechanistic feature of these electrocatalysts developed thus far is an electrogenerated reduced metal center associated with catalytic CO2 reduction. Here we report a heterogenized zinc–porphyrin complex (zinc(II) 5,10,15,20-tetramesitylporphyrin) as an electrocatalyst that delivers a turnover frequency as high as 14.4 site–1 s–1 and a Faradaic efficiency as high as 95% for CO2 electroreduction to CO at −1.7 V vs the standard hydrogen electrode in an organic/water mixed electrolyte. While the Zn center is critical to the observed catalysis, in situ and operando X-ray absorption spectroscopic studies reveal that it is redox-innocent throughout the potential range. Cyclic voltammetry indicates that the porphyrin ligand may act as a redox mediator. Chemical reduction of the zinc–porphyrin complex further confirms that the reduction is ligand-based and the reduced species can react with CO2. This represents the first example of a transition-metal complex for CO2 electroreduction catalysis with its metal center being redox-innocent under working conditions.

A persistent challenge in chemistry is to activate abundant, yet inert molecules such as hydrocarbons and atmospheric N 2 . In particular, forming C–N bonds from N 2 typically requires a reactive organic precursor 1 , which limits the ability to design catalytic cycles. Here, we report an diketiminate-supported iron system that is able to sequentially activate benzene and N 2 to form aniline derivatives. The key to this new coupling reaction is the partial silylation of a reduced iron-N 2 complex, which is followed by migratory insertion of a benzene-derived phenyl group to the nitrogen. Further reduction releases the nitrogen products, and the resulting iron species can re-enter the cyclic pathway. Using a mixture of sodium powder, crown ether, and trimethylsilyl bromide, an easily prepared diketiminate iron bromide complex 2 can mediate the one-pot conversion of several petroleum-derived compounds into the corresponding silylated aniline derivatives using N 2 as the nitrogen source. Numerous compounds along the cyclic pathway have been isolated and crystallographically characterized; their reactivity outlines the mechanism including the hydrocarbon activation step and the N 2 functionalization step. This strategy incorporates nitrogen atoms from N 2 directly into abundant hydrocarbons.