Thursday, June 24, 2010

Doming in a Ferryl-to-Ring Charge Transfer Complex

It's noteworthy that I attempted to showcase the "bright magenta" or "bright fuchsia" color, in the positive-phase lobes of the atomic orbitals and molecular orbitals (MOs), but the program only allowed for a "poppy red" color in these diagrams. I wasn't aware that poppies were red, but what do I know. These diagrams show the formation of a ferryl-to-ring charge-transfer complex, as part of a "charge-transfer state" or "charge-transfer electronic state," to allow for an electron transition to occur, and this transition is from one of the two roughly-degenerate, highest-occupied MOs (in this case--and as is usually the case in iron(IV)-hemes--these are the pi*xz and pi*yz antibonding MOs) to the lowest-unoccupied molecular orbital of the porphyrin ring that can be found in this particular electronic state (a state that I haven't defined here) of an iron(IV)-heme. In this case, it's one of the two eg(pi*) antibonding MOs (A and B, a.k.a. x and y) that tend to combine, through configuration interaction, into a new pair of MOs (one that is produced by constructive interaction and another that's produced through destructive overlap). The eg(A+B) and eg(A-B) configuration-interaction MOs actually appear to be quite similar, and the MO I drew might not actually be the true LUMO of the porphyrin moiety (it might be the eg(A-B)). It's noteworthy that the egA(pi*) and egB(pi*) MOs do not exhibit the same "appearance" in "Cartesian Coordinate System 1" as they do in "Cartesian Coordinate System 2," as I've named the two "systems" [see here: (http://hardcorephysiologyfun.blogspot.com/2010/05/occupancies-of-frontier-orbitals-of.html)]. I've redrawn the MOs from Fig. 9A, on p. 124, of the article by Hocking et al. (2007) [Hocking et al., 2007: (http://www.anorg.chem.uu.nl/PDF/hocking%20JACS2007.pdf)(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17199290)], in coordinate system 1, instead of depicting them in the less-commonly-used coordinate system 2, with the x and y axes intersecting the nitrogen atoms of the pyrrole moieties of the porphyrin ring, that Hocking et al. (2007) show in Fig 9. The doming of the porphyrin ring normally occurs for very brief durations, such as less than one picosecond, during the catalytic cycles of heme-dependent enzymes. A "charge transfer" is basically just a one-electron transfer from a highest-occupied molecular orbital of one molecule or moiety of a molecule to a lowest-unoccupied molecular orbital of another molecule or of another moiety, within a single molecule. In this case, the ferryl moiety is undergoing a one-electron oxidation by the porphyrin ring.





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