Ligand Influence on Structural and Spectroscopic Properties of Beryllium Oxocarboxylates.

Aluminum-based adjuvants for vaccines and beryllium ions interact with the same immune receptor. The Be4O core, which is also found in beryllium oxocarboxylates, has been proposed to be the binding species in the latter case. However, this is not proven due to a lack of suitable probes for the Be4O moiety. Therefore, a versatile synthetic route to beryllium oxocarboxylates has been developed to investigate the steric and electronic influence of the ligands onto their molecular and spectroscopic properties. The oxocarboxylates exhibit extremely narrow line widths in 9Be NMR spectroscopy, and the chemical shift is only influenced by the sterics of the ligands. The mean variation of the atomic distances in the central Be4O building block is extremely small over all investigated compounds, and even the C-C distances are only little perturbed by the properties of the ligands. Vibrational spectroscopy showed Be-O bands; however, further distinctions could not be drawn.