Chemical tricks to stabilize silanones and their heavier homologues with E=O bonds (E=Si-Pb): from elusive species to isolable building blocks.

In contrast to the well-established chemistry of ketones (R2C=O), the reactivity of the elusive heavier congeners R2E=O (E=Si, Ge, Sn, Pb) is far less explored because of the high polarity of the E=O bonds and hence their tendency to oligomerize with no activation barrier. Very recently, great advances have been achieved in the synthesis of isolable compounds with E=O bonds, including the investigation of donor-stabilized isolable silanones and the first stable "genuine" germanone. These compounds show drastically different reactivities compared to ketones and represent versatile building blocks in silicon-oxygen and germanium-oxygen chemistry. This and other exciting achievements are described in this Minireview.