We've all seen the colourful solids that organometallics can produce but what about two-tone crystals?!
A breakthrough in organometallic chemistry has shown that agostic isomers do, indeed, exist! An agostic interaction is one of a coordinatively unsaturated transition metal (a 16-electron complex, rather than the 18-electron norm) and a carbon-hydrogen bond. This is possible since the two electrons from the hydrogen atom enter the empty d-orbital of the transition metal.
As you may know, organometallics is a particularly useful area of chemistry when it comes to catalysis. This was how they were discovered. Scientists in the US carried out a catalytic run and recorded possible evidence of a 16-electron complex. We know these would be unstable and therefore extremely difficult to isolate. However, the agostic interactions stable this intermediate and the scientists were able to isolate the species as a crystal since interconversion between the isomers happened much slower than it would in solution.
Interesting stuff, and a real breakthrough!
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