Re-examining Fenton and Fenton-like reactions (2024)

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Published: 07 July 2021

Dan Meyerstein ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5429-8901^1,2

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume5,pages 595–597 (2021)Cite this article

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Catalytic mechanisms
Inorganic chemistry

The Fenton and Fenton-like reactions are important in biology because they are a major source of oxidative stress. The reactions also feature in advanced oxidation technologies to remediate organic pollutants. Unfortunately, these reactions are often simplistically viewed as affording only OH˙ radicals as the active species. Indeed, a variety of additional oxidizing intermediates form, including OR˙, Mⁿ⁺²L_m, MⁿL_m−1(O₂H⁻), MⁿL_m−1(O₂R⁻) and CO₃˙⁻, depending on the system. Under physiological conditions, CO₃˙⁻ is probably the major oxidizing intermediate.

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Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to all his colleagues and students whose studies are cited herein, without them this work would be impossible. Thanks to the Pazy Foundation for the grant involving the role of carbonate in catalytic oxidations.

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Authors and Affiliations

Department of Chemical Sciences and The Radical Research Center, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel
Dan Meyerstein
Chemistry Department, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Dan Meyerstein

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