LAUSR

Organometallics X-ray crystallography is often construed as the most direct means of characterizing molecular structure. Nonetheless, it still relies on an accurate assessment of elemental composition to begin with. Amemiya et al. report a strange case in which a structure previously assigned to a cadmium carbonyl compound appears much more consistent with a rhenium carbonyl. Although the initial refinement statistics seemed reasonable, the ratio of displacement parameters for the metal versus the ligand atoms was unusually small. The authors further concluded that coordinative carbon and chlorine sites in the ligands were more likely to be nitrogen and sulfur, respectively. Chem. Sci. 10.1039/d0sc04596a (2020).