Quantitative structure-activity relationships for aqueous metal-siderophore complexes.

Siderophores, biogenic chelating agents that facilitate the solubilization and uptake of ferric iron, form stable complexes with a wide range of nutrient and contaminant metals and thus may profoundly affect their fate, transport, and biogeochemical cycling. To understand more comprehensively the factors that control the stability and reactivity, as well as the potential for microbial uptake, of metal-siderophore complexes, we probed the structures of complexes formed between the trihydroxamate siderophore desferrioxamine B (DFOB) and Cu(II), Ga(III), Mn(II), Ni(II), and Zn(II) in solution by using extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy. We find that all metals studied are dominantly in octahedral coordination, with significant Jahn-Teller distortion of the Cu(II)HDFOB(0) complex. Additionally, log-transformed complex stability constants correlate not only with the charge-normalized interatomic distances within the complex, affirming and expanding existing predictive relationships, but also with the Debye-Waller parameter of the first coordination shell. The derived structure-activity relationships not only quantitatively relate the measured physical architecture of aqueous complexes to their observed stability but also allow for the prediction of siderophore-metal stability constants.