Pacman complexes – Chemists imagination at work
Doing my weekly lit overview, I found on the Chem Comm Advance articles page a review, which title immediately attracted my eye. During my studies, I learnt how chemists can be smart when having to coin new names for molecules and techniques – think for example about the DEAD reagent, the INADEQUATE NMR technique, or the scorpionate ligands – but there I found a category I had never heard of: the PACMAN complexes… It reminded me the computer game I used to play on an old Commodore 128 many years ago – and yes! It was actually it! With some imagination, the molecules of interest can be associated to the famous yellow, pizza-missing-a-slice, figure. The authors probably don’t indicate how many pac-dots these molecules can eat, but many more informations can be found here!
The NMR bunch come up with so many strange acronyms. I do like it when people describe their molecules in such an easy way to imagine – makes reading the paper so much easier than ‘a benzene based compound with para carboxylic acid and acetyl ester groups’. Either a picture, or a nice description, preferably both please!