Is the ruthenium analogue of compound I of cytochrome P450 an efficient oxidant? A theoretical investigation of the methane hydroxylation reaction

High-valent metal-oxo complexes catalyze C-H bond activation by oxygen insertion, with an efficiency that depends on the identity of the transition metal and its oxidation state. Our study uses density functional calculations and theoretical analysis to derive fundamental factors of catalytic activity, by comparison of a ruthenium-oxo catalyst with its iron-oxo analogue toward methane hydroxylation. The study focuses on the ruthenium analogue of the active species of the enzyme cytochrome P450, which is known to be among the most potent catalysts for C-H activation. The computed reaction pathways reveal one high-spin (HS) and two low-spin (LS) mechanisms, all nascent from the low-lying states of the ruthenium-oxo catalyst (Ogliaro, F.; cle Visser, S. P.; Groves, J. T.; Shaik, S. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2001, 40, 2874-2878). These mechanisms involve a bond activation phase, in which the transition states (TS's) appear as hydrogen abstraction species, followed by a C-O bond making phase, through a rebound of the methyl radical on the metal-hydroxo complex. However, while the HS mechanism has a significant rebound barrier, and hence a long lifetime of the radical intermediate, by contrast, the LS ones are effectively concerted with small barriers to rebound, if at all. Unlike the iron catalyst, the hydroxylation reaction for the ruthenium analogue is expected to follow largely a single-state reactivity on the LS surface, due to a very large rebound barrier of the HS process and to the more efficient spin crossover expected for ruthenium. As such, ruthenium-oxo catalysts (Groves, J. T.; Shalyaev, K.; Lee, J. In The Porphyrin Handbook, Biochemistry and Binding: Activation of Small Molecules, Vol. 4; Kadish, K. M., Smith, K. M., Guilard, R., Eds.; Academic Press: New York, 2000; pp 17-40) are expected to lead to more stereoselective hydroxylations compared with the corresponding iron-oxo reactions. It is reasoned that the rutheniumoxo catalyst should have larger turnover numbers compared with the iron-oxo analogue, due to lesser production of suicidal side products that destroy the catalyst (Ortiz de Montellano, P. R.; Beilan, H. S.; Kunze, K.L.; Mico, B. A. J. Biol. Chem. 1981, 256, 4395-4399). The computations reveal also that the ruthenium complex is more electrophilic than its iron analogue, having lower hydrogen abstraction barriers. These reactivity features of the ruthenium-oxo system are analyzed and shown to originate from a key fundamental factor, namely, the strong 4d(Ru)-2p(O,N) overlaps, which produce high-lying pi*(Ru-O), sigma*(Ru-O), and sigma*(Ru-N) orbitals and thereby to lead to a preference of ruthenium for higher-valent oxidation states with higher electrophilcity, for the effectively concerted LS hydroxylation mechanism, and for less suicidal complexes. As such, the ruthenium-oxo species is predicted to be a more robust catalyst than its iron-oxo analogue.