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Re-examining Fenton and Fenton-like reactions

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+2Lm, MnLm−1(O2H), MnLm−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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Correspondence to Dan Meyerstein.

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Meyerstein, D. Re-examining Fenton and Fenton-like reactions. Nat Rev Chem 5, 595–597 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-021-00310-4

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