Activation of dioxygen by copper complexes in water for the selective oxidation/oxygenation of organic substrates

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Selective oxidations of organic substrates such as e. g. cyclohexane are extremely important in chemical industry and in the laboratory. Up to now many of these reactions are performed in organic solvents applying oxidants that often are toxic or bad for the environment and/or expensive catalysts based on noble metals. Furthermore, most of the time it is necessary to run these reactions at higher temperatures and pressures. In contrast metalloenzymes, often monooxygenases with iron or copper ions at the active site are capable to perform these reactions under ambient conditions in water with dioxygen from air as an oxidant. Model compounds have been applied to mimic the reactivity of these enzymes, however, so far the oxidation/oxygenation reactions mainly were performed in organic solvents. For applications in industry there is the danger of the formation of explosive mixtures of organic solvents and dioxygen, that can lead to a fire or even an explosion. In this project copper complexes should be modified in such a way that it will be possible to perform oxidation/oxygenation reactions of organic substrates in water with dioxygen as the sole oxidant.