Toward the development of metal-based synthetic nucleases and peptidases: a rationale and progress report in applying the principles of coordination chemistry

Recently there has been great interest in designing small metal complexes which are capable of catalytically hydrolyzing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), ribonucleic acid (RNA), and proteins. In this review, we attempt to justify this goal, as well as discussing some of the strategies currently being pursued. In addition, because much of the work is based on a few well-studied enzymatic hydrolases and exchange-inert metal complexes, the mechanisms proposed for these systems will also be briefly discussed, with special attention being paid to the relevance of these systems to the design of synthetic metallohydrolases. However, since the ultimate goal is not only to design an efficient hydrolase, but also to completely understand the mechanism, this review will generally be limited to labile metal complexes for which the coordination geometry is known and detailed kinetic and/or mechanistic information is available. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A.