Ligand Design for Electrochemically Controlling Stoichiometric and Catalytic Reactivity of Transition Metals

Changing the oxidation state of redox-active ligands is a powerful method for electrochemically controlling the reactivity and selectivity of bound transition metals (see drawing on the right). In some cases reaction rates can be increased by many orders of magnitude simply by removing an electron from a metal–ligand complex. In the case of polymeric redox-active ligands, a continuous range of properties can be achieved for the transition metal complex.