Study on the Chemistry of Molybdenum—Iron—Sulfur and Iron—Sulfur Clusters

The occurrence and development of some clusters are closely related to chemical bionics, the chemistry of Fe-S and Mo-Fe-S clusters has been developed under the promotion of the biochemical investigations of ferredoxins and nitrogenase and investigations of chemical imitation. It is known that there are two or more than two metal clusters in proteins and enzymes, in which metal atoms bridged with sulfur atoms are connected by terminal groups with residual groups of amino acid in polypeptide chains, the 2-Fe and 4-Fe prosthetic groups of ferredoxin are examples of them. The biological clusters have been investigated thoroughly [Sweeney et al. 1980], in which an iron and four sulfur atoms form a tetrahedron configuration. Holm et al. prepared the imitators of biological clusters in very simple system in 1978, and investigated deeply their structures, redox properties and reaction chemistry (Holm, Laskowski 1978, 1979; Mascharak et al. 1981). Fe-S cluster chemistry has been developed further on the basis of above-mentioned work.