Carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead

The advances in Group 14 chemistry reported this year lean heavily toward materials with extended structures. Chief amongst the areas represented are silica, functionalised, derivatised and decorated to give functional materials of many different types and binary chalcogenides, many of which show quantum dot behaviours. In small molecule species, some of the most exciting developments are in the low coordination number and low oxidation state compounds and in the activation of carbon dioxide. In the former category, one of the most interesting is the complex comprising a single germanium(II) ion in a cryptand, the first example of a stable, crystallographically analysed complex containing a more or less naked M(II) ion.