Recently, the team of Professor Haiping Xia, the Chair Professor of Department of Chemistry and executive director of Shenzhen Grubbs Institute, published a review article in Chemical Reviews, a high-impact international journal, entitled  “Metallaaromatic Chemistry: History and Development.” It is the first time for the scientists to review the research progress and future direction of the metallaaromatic chemistry in this journal for the past two decades.

The concept of metallaaromatic chemistry was firstly proposed in 1979 by the Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffmann. Due to the participation of d– or f-orbitals of the metal atoms in the π conjunction, metallaaromatic complexes possess variable valence states, abundant ligands, and multiple coordination modes in metal centers, leading to diverse and special physical and chemical properties. At present, metallaaromatic complexes mainly include metallabenzenes, metallabenzynes, heterometallaaromatics, dianion metalloles, carbolongs, and spiro metalloles (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Typical scaffolds of metallaaromatics.

The authors discussed the syntheses, reactivities, and applications of the above-mentioned six kinds of metallaaromatics in detail. They pointed out that as special organometallic aromatic complexes, metallaaromatics have great application potential in catalysis and materials.

Research Associate Professor Dafa Chen at Shenzhen Grubbs Institute is the first author, Dr. Yuhui Hua is the second author, and Professor Haiping Xia is the corresponding author.

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Catalysis, and the National Key R&D Program of Chinawere acknowledged for this research.

Paper link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00392