Hi All!
You probably have seen the news that MOFs won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry This year!
If you wanted to use some MOF things in your teaching soon, Chip Nataro put together a collection of 7 MOF LO's (Thanks Chip!), and we are hoping to make more MOF LO's soon.
This is a really interesting paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2025, 147, 34641-34646) involving a complex salt in which both the cation and anion are metallocenes. While a majority of the paper is focused on the characterization of two new compounds, it presents some excellent opportunities to practice counting electrons, one of which was a challenge to this author.
This literature discussion is in honor of Dr. Josh Figueroa, recipient of the 2026 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry. Josh has done some tremendous work with isocyanide ligands and this paper is but a brief glimpse into this field. The complexes of interest contain carbonyl ligands and isocyanide ligands, so there are plenty of opportunities for students to use group theory to predict the number of IR-active vibrations for these ligands.
As we head into a new year (it can't be that time already can it?), I thought it would be worth giving you some updates...
First, thanks to those that filled out the community survey. While we are continuing to digest all of the comments, there were at least two common themes that I will comment on.
Greetings members of the IONiC community,
This literature discussion was inspired by a talk given by Dr. Nora Radu, recipient of the 2025 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry. It is a bit 'big picture' in nature in that the hydrocyanation reaction is important for the synthesis of nylon. As such, there is a significant amount of background material relating to nylon-6,6. Students will read an article from C&EN, portions of a patent, and portions of an article from J. Chem.
Join us on Tuesday, April 15 at 2 pm Eastern (11 am Pacific) for a "DIC-structured" seminar in which senior and junior PUI faculty members discuss how they have successfully published research on research project(s) with undergraduate students. Kyle Grice (DePaul) and Jacob Lutter (University of Southern Indiana) will present on how they have been successful in designing and publishing research at their respective PUI.
This literature discussion is based on a short JACS communication reporting the first isolable Sc(II) carbonyls (not a typo) and isocyanides. The paper discusses some standard synthesis and characterization while exploring a more fundamental question regarding why Sc, a d-block metal, is considered a rare-earth and when it stops reacting analogously to the rare-earth metals. The LO focuses on ye olde carbonyl stretching frequencies and back-bonding and makes a nice follow up to an introduction to that concept. It tries to make students explicitly connect electron configuration to changes
This literature discussion LO was created for the ACS National Award Winners 2025 collection. Dr. Greg C. Fu for being the recipient of the Gabor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis 2025 from the American Chemical Society.
This literature discussion was prepared as part of the 2025 ACS awards collection in honor of Gary J. Schrobilgen, winner of the M. Frederick Hawthorne Award in Main Group Inorganic Chemistry.