Mössbauer EPR, and DFT Studies of Oxygen Activation in Enzymes and Biologically Relevant Synthetic Complexes

Long before Joseph Priestley’s observation that heating lead and mercury oxides generates oxygen, Leonardo da Vinci proposed that one of the two main gases that make
up air must be capable of supporting both flames and life. Today, nearly five hundred years after da Vinci’s death, researchers are busy trying to understand the evolution and
activation of oxygen in biochemical reactions, as well as the maladies that result when oxygen activation is not tightly regulated. At the forefront of the field of ‘oxygen activation’ are questions regarding how O2 can be made to react with high specificity at ambient temperature and how we can understand nature’s oxygen activation strategies.