Making Moco: A Personal History

This contribution describes the path of my nearly forty-year quest to understand the special ligand coordinated to molybdenum and tungsten ions in their respective enzymes. Through this quest, I aimed to discover why nature did not simply use a methyl group on the dithiolene that chelates Mo and W but instead chose a complicated pyranopterin. My journey sought answers through the synthesis of model Mo compounds that allowed systematic investigations of the interactions between molybdenum and pterin and molybdenum and pterin-dithiolene and revealed special features of the pyranopterin dithiolene chelate bound to molybdenum.