The road to non-heme oxoferryls and beyond.

Oxoiron(IV) species are often implicated in the catalytic cycles of oxygen-activating non-heme iron enzymes. The paucity of suitable model complexes stimulated us to fill this void, and our synthetic efforts have afforded a number of oxoiron(IV) complexes. This Account provides a chronological perspective of the observations that contributed to the generation of the first non-heme iron(IV)-oxo complexes in high yield and summarizes their salient properties to date.