From left: Nabhednu, Anindita, Sayan, Tilak, Ayan, Dr. Amit Majumdar, Tuhin, Manish, Koushik, Jyotiprakash and Tridib.

Research Objectives: 

Our research group has been involved in the area of synthetic inorganic chemistry toward designing of proficient strategies to achieve synthesis and characterization of unusual transition metal complexes, relevant structural-functional model systems for important enzyme active sites and discovering unusual reactivity with a goal to expand the scope of synthetic inorganic chemistry as well as bioinorganic chemistry.

The specific areas of interest include:

• Reactivity of Nitric oxide with thiol/hydrosulfide in the presence of redox active first row transition metals
• Functional modeling of flavodiiron nitric oxide reductases, conversion of NO to N₂O, mechanistic aspects
• Non-heme, mono/di-nuclear iron/cobalt complexes
• Thiolate and hydrosulfide complexes of first row transition metals, selective synthesis and mechanistic aspects

In particular, within the last 8 years we have achieved the following exciting results: (1) nonheme diiron(II) complexes which contain free thiols, (2) dinculear Co(II) complexes which contain only one terminal hydrosulfide, (3) nonheme mononitrosyl diiron complex with [Fe^II{FeNO}⁷] formulation which produces N₂O upon reduction, (4) desulfurization of thiols, sulfides and thiophenes at room temperature, (5) nonheme diiron(II) and diiron(II, III) complexes with either one/two terminal/bridging hydrosulfide/s, (6) Co(II) and Fe(II) mediated consecutive cleavage of C-S and S-S bond in disulfides, (7) superreduction vs. semireduction mechanism for the conversion of NO to N₂O mediated by two functional model complexes of FNORs, (8) isolation of the intermediate that leads to the transition metal mediated C-S bond clevage of thiolates in dinuclear Co(II)/Fe(II)/Ni(II) complexes, (9) syntheis of a unique nonheme monohydrosulfido dinitrosyldiiron complex with [HS{FeNO}⁷/{FeNO}⁷] formulation which produces N₂O upon reduction, (10) two-electron redox reaction between coordinated thiolates and elemental sulfur to yield trisulfide (S₃^2-) and pentasulfide (S₅^2-) chain in binuclear Zn(II) complexes, (11) nitrite induced structural changes in binuclear Mn(II)-thiolate complexes.