Organometallics roundtable 2011

An edited transcript of the discussions at the Organometallics Roundtable 2011 held on August 29, 2011 is presented. Jennifer Schomaker says that she would like to have a broader range of high-valent metal oxo complexes that contain easily tunable non-porphyrin ligands. Jim Mayer was thinking more about pure and simple chemical stability. People are doing reactions at higher temperatures and under more forcing conditions, with more stable ligands, such as the pincer ligands having been developed by Alan Goldman, Jensen and Kaska, and Brookhart. Vy Dong says that his students had a debate regarding this very question last year, and they chose the Mo-catalyzed Z-selective olefin metathesis reaction developed by Amir Hoveyda and Richard Schrock as the top achievement in organometallic chemistry last year. There are many exciting aspects of that work. For one, the complex itself has a unique structure, bearing a pyrrolide, a tunable imido, and an axially chiral binol-derived ligand.