Classic organometallic compounds are often highly reactive, but can also be surprisingly inert or stable. Many chelating co-ligands have been developed that enable, guide and tame these properties into useful chemical transformations, e.g., catalytic reactions, or stabilize compounds with astonishing physical characteristics such as specific luminescence properties. Especially stable organometallic compounds form, when the central element and its ligands engage in more covalent bonds . The covalency increases, e.g., for late transition metals, such as Pd, Au, or Pt, or when moving down the group triads of the periodic table, e.g., Fe/Ru/Os. Also, the remaining ligand sphere around the central metal influences the bonding interactions.

New Organometallic compounds have proven to be useful for the tailoring material properties and for discovering new catalytic reactions with more benign elements to replace classic noble metal catalysts, which is considerably driving progress in sustainable chemistry. As such, we are interested in the fundamental organometallic chemistry of transition metal and main-group elements.