What is Bioinorganic Chemistry?

Bioinorganic chemistry involves the study of metal species in biological systems. As an introduction to the basic inorganic chemistry needed for understanding bioinorganic topics, this chapter will discuss the essential chemical elements, the occurrences and purposes of metal centers in biological species, the geometries of ligand fields surrounding these metal centers, and ionic states preferred by the metals. Important considerations include equilibria between metal centers and their ligands and a basic understanding of the kinetics of biological metal – ligand systems. The occurrence of organometallic complexes and clusters in metalloproteins will be discussed briefly, and an introduction to electron transfer in coordination complexes will be presented.