Vol. 27 No. 2
March-April 2005

Vanadium Chemistry

by Tamas Kiss

The 4th International Symposium on Chemistry and Biological Chemistry of Vanadium was held 3–5 September 2004 in Szeged, Hungary. The symposium followed the 7th European Biological Inorganic Chemistry (EUROBIC) conference (Gearmich Partenkirchen, Germany) and provided a forum for the presentation and discussion of recent results in the following areas:

• biological aspects of vanadium chemistry
• inorganic chemistry of vanadium
• vanadium chemistry in catalysis and organic synthesis

Vanadis, Norse Goddess of Love and Beauty, the deity after whom vanadium was named, and after whom the new award is named.

The conference attracted over 110 participants from 25 countries and 4 continents. There were 5 plenary lectures (Hirao, Pecoraro, Yamamoto, Tracey, and Sakurai), 14 invited lectures, 9 lectures, and 57 posters presented during the program. The plenary and section lectures represented the wide scope of vanadium chemistry.

Fifteen lectures dealt with the biological importance of vanadium and its role in halogenoperoxidases and in forming insulin-mimetic compounds. Eleven lectures presented new results concerning the versatile inorganic chemistry of vanadium. Five papers discusssed vanadium compounds as catalysts. The distribution of the 57 posters presentations among the three main areas was very similar.

V. Pecoraro, R. Vewer, J. Littlechild, M. Sivak, and G. Santoni presented results of using synthetic, structural, biological, and computational methods to understand the mechanism of vanadium haloperoxidases. H. Sakurai, D.C. Crans, C. Orvig, D. Rehder, Y. Shechter, and M. Makinen reported new developments of insulin enhancing vanadium complexes as potential pharmaceuticals. Various aspects of the bioinorganic chemistry of vanadium were discussed in lectures by H. Michibata (vanadium accumulating Ascidians), T. Hubergtse (Amavadine), M. A. Alves (vanadium toxicity), and B. Vertessy (enzyme regulation).

Various aspects of the inorganic chemistry of vanadium were also discussed in the following lectures by A. Tracey, K. Hegetschweiler, J. Horzicek, L. Pettersson, J. Costa Pessoa, and K. Majlesi (equilibrium and structure), J. Hartung, T. Kabanos, A. Salifoglou (synthesis), T. Hirao, V. Conte (redox chemistry), and A. Keramidas, J. Krzystek (spectroscopy).

Recent results in the catalytic behavior of various vanadium complexes were reported in a fascinating plenary lecture by H. Yamamoto and section lectures by C. Lorber and E. Rosenthal. Also of note was the awarding of the first-ever Vanadis Award to Debbie C. Crans (University of Colorado, USA).

The entire program and abstracts of the symposium, list of participants, and photographs of the event can be accessed at <www.staff.u-szeged.hu/~vanadium>. A selection of the plenary and invited lectures will be published in Pure and Applied Chemistry.

The V5 Symposium is planned for fall 2006 in San Francisco, California, USA.

Tamas Kiss <[email protected]> is a professor in the Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at University of Szeged in Hungary. He served as the chairman of the 4th International Symposium on Chemistry and Biological Chemistry of Vanadium.