13.4: Survey of Organometallic Ligands

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Organometallic chemistry may be taught in many ways. Some textbooks spend a significant chunk of time discussing ligands, while others forego ligand surveys to dive right in to reactions and mechanisms. I like the ligand survey approach because it allows you to get a grip on expected behaviour for each type of ligand before you see them pop up as intermediates in reaction cycles. With the general principles in hand, it becomes easier to generate explanations for observed each ligan's effect on a reactions. Instead of generalizing from complex, specific examples in the context of reaction mechanisms, we’ll look at general trends first and apply these to reaction intermediates and mechanisms later. This section will kick off with carbon monoxide, a simple but fascinating ligand.

This section begins a survey of some of the most common or most interesting ligands in organometallic complexes. We will begin with a survey of ligands that participate in "dative" bonding to metal ions in this section (\(\PageIndex{}\)), followed by ligands that interact with metal ions through their \(\pi\) electrons, and those that have multiple metal-carbon bonds in the following sections.