It is well known that nutritive organic substrates, such as proteins, carbohydrates and lipids etc ., are fairly reactive compounds whose reactions are very selective. Therefore it seems interesting for us to investigate the catalytic reaction of metal complexes coordinated with nutritive organic substrates as a mimetic sample of enzymatic reaction.
For one example, it is dealt with the transformation of carbohydrate by utilizing nickel complexes with various polyamines and counter anions. Important informations are as follows.
Aldoses were rapidly epimerized at C-2 by nickel (II) -diamine complexes. Recently we studied this reaction under various conditions, which are ligands, anions, reaction temperature and the molar ratio of ligand to metal ion.