Work on the electronic
structures of metal–oxo complexes
began in Copenhagen over 50 years ago. This work led to the prediction
that tetragonal multiply bonded transition metal–oxos would
not be stable beyond the iron–ruthenium–osmium oxo wall
in the periodic table and that triply bonded metal–oxos could
not be protonated, even in the strongest Brønsted acids. In this
theory, only double bonded metal–oxos could attract protons,
with basicities being a function of the electron donating ability
of ancillary ligands. Such correlations of electronic structure with
reactivity have gained importance in recent years, most notably owing
to the widespread recognition that high-valent iron–oxos are
intermediates in biological reactions critical to life on Earth.In this Account, we focus attention on the oxygenations of inert
organic substrates by cytochromes P450, as these reactions involve
multiply bonded iron–oxos. We emphasize that P450 iron–oxos
are strong oxidants, so strong that they would destroy nearby amino
acids if substrates are not oxygenated rapidly; it is our view that
these high-valent iron–oxos are such dangerous reactive oxygen
species that Nature surely found ways to disable them. Looking more
deeply into this matter, mainly by examining many thousands of structures
in the Protein Data Bank, we have found that P450s and other enzymes
that require oxygen for function have chains of tyrosines and tryptophans
that extend from active-site regions to protein surfaces. Tyrosines
are near the heme active sites in bacterial P450s, whereas tryptophan
is closest in most human enzymes. High-valent iron–oxo survival
times taken from hole hopping maps range from a few nanoseconds to
milliseconds, depending on the distance of the closest Trp or Tyr
residue to the heme. In our proposed mechanism, multistep hole tunneling
(hopping) through Tyr/Trp chains guides the damaging oxidizing hole
to the protein surface, where it can be quenched by soluble protein
or small molecule reductants. As the Earth’s oxygenic atmosphere
is believed to have developed about 2.5 billion years ago, the increase
in occurrence frequency of tyrosine and tryptophan since the last
universal evolutionary ancestor may be in part a consequence of enzyme
protective functions that developed to cope with the environmental
toxin, O2.