Theoretical Study of the Mechanism of Oxoiron(IV) Formation from H2O2 and a Nonheme Iron(II) Complex: O-O Cleavage Involving Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer

It has recently been shown that the nonheme oxoiron (IV) species supported by the 1,4,8,11-tetramethyl-1,4,8,11-tetraazacyclotetradecane ligand (TMC) can be generated in near-quantitative yield by reacting [Fe-II(TMC)(OTf)(2)] with a stoichiometric amount of H2O2 in CH3CN in the presence of 2,6-lutidine (Li, F,; England, J.; Que, L., Jr. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 2134-2135). This finding has major implications for O-O bond cleavage events in both Fenton chemistry and nonheme iron enzymes. To understand the mechanism of this process, especially the intimate details of the O-O bond cleavage step, a series of density functional theory (DFT) calculations and analyses have been carried out. Two distinct reaction paths (A and B) were identified. Path A consists of two principal steps: (1) coordination of H2O2 to Fe(II) and (2) a combination of partial homolytic O-O bond cleavage and proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET). The latter combination renders the rate-limiting O-O cleavage effectively a heterolytic process. Path B proceeds via a simulations homolytic O-O bond cleavage of H2O2 and Fe-O bond formation. This is followed by H abstraction from the resultant Fe(III)-OH species by an center dot OH radical. Calculations suggest that path B is plausible in the absence of base. However, once 2,6-lutidine is added to the reacting system, the reaction barrier is lowered and more importantly the mechanistic path switches to path A, where 2,6-lutidine pays an essential role as an acid base catalyst in a manner similar to how the distal histidine or glutamate residue assists in compound I formation in heme peroxidases. The reaction was found to proceed predominantly on the quintet spin state surface, and a transition to the triplet state, the experimentally known ground state for the TMC-oxoiron(IV) species, occurs in the last stage of the oxoiron(IV) formation process.