INNOBA: Infusing Nobility to Base Metals through Metal-Ligand Cooperation

Catalysis plays a fundamental role in the efficient manufacture of all manner of products used in our daily life, but ton-scale industrial processes still rely on some of the rarest metals in the Earth's crust, such as rhodium, palladium, iridium, and platinum. The continued use of these elements represents a major challenge that must be addressed if truly sustainable chemical processes are to be developed.

To tackle this issue, current strategies exploit the use of base metals (BM) and main group (MG) elements, albeit catalytic applications based on their separate use is hampered by the preference for one-electron redox events and their poorly understood redox activity, respectively.

This proposal will merge the fields of coordination chemistry, organometallic synthesis, and catalysis, aiming at unveiling platforms merging the most promising properties of both strategies. With the objective of promoting and controlling two-electron events at BM centres, low-valent group 13 elements will be used to promote cooperative bond activation processes.

This will allow us to infuse nobility to base metals, mimic organic transformations traditionally performed by precious metals and provide reactivity beyond them. This project will pair Al, the most abundant metal on Earth, with sustainable and highly abundant BM. Catalytic use of BM combined with subvalent Al ligands remains an uncharted territory and an exceptional opportunity to establish a new chemical space.

The development of INNOBA will certainly lead to unique sustainable catalytic platforms and, eventually, a dramatic reduction of the carbon footprint of countless organic transformations currently catalysed by precious NM catalysts.