Visible light generation of high-valent metal-oxo intermediates and mechanistic insights into catalytic oxidations.

High-valent metal-oxo complexes play central roles as active oxygen atom transfer (OAT) agents in many enzymatic and synthetic oxidation catalysis. This review focuses on our recent advances in application of photochemical approaches to probe the oxidizing metal-oxo species with different metals and macrocyclic ligands. Under visible light irradiation, a variety of important metal-oxo species including iron-oxo porphyrins, manganese-oxo porphyrin/corroles, ruthenium-oxo porphyrins, and chromium-oxo salens have been successfully generated.