The previous standards for borane's nomenclature also came from the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) back in 2005. This organization is an authority on chemical terminology worldwide with the mission of unifying the global community of chemistry in order to facilitate international collaboration through standarization. However, the nomenclature set up 15 years ago was a ‘holding’ chapter, a reinforcement of the standards formed in the 1990’s, which covered the basic, already established parts of a field that is considered otherwise to be ‘contentious’ and ‘specialized’.

Decades later, a new appraisal has been undertaken in order to address the new discoveries made in the field, including a considerable amount of new composites. To do so, a team of 11 international experts was put together, including ICMAB Researcher Clara Viñas, from the Inorganic Materials & Catalysis (LMI) group.

The IUPAC Recommendations are designed to offer unambiguous, uniform, and consistent nomenclature and terminology to refer to particular specific fields within chemistry, through glossaries of terms, definitions, chemical compound nomenclatures, classifications, definitions of symbols and units, amongst others. In this case, the publication delineates 25 specific recommendations to keep in mind when referring to different kind of boranes. These recommendations can be substitutions, additions, or replacements to the previously stablished ones, introducing all the changes necessary to the field. They are also throughly explained throughout the article. 

These recommendations will help establish consistent ways to talk about boranes and other related species, all relevant composites for the work being done at ICMAB. You can read some of the articles and publications we have published working with borane composites:

• New ruthenium-based metallocarboranes for bimodal cancer therapy
• Icosahedral carboranes as scaffolds for congested regioselective polyaryl compounds: the distinct distance tuning of C–C and its antipodal B–B
• The longest C-C bonds are found in the carboranes by Clara Viñas et al!
• 3,2,1 and stop! An innovative, straightforward and clean route for the flash synthesis of metallacarboranes
• Metallacarboranes on the Road to Anticancer Therapies: Cellular Uptake, DNA Interaction, and Biological Evaluation of Cobaltabisdicarbollide [COSAN]−
• Electrochemistry and Photoluminescence of Icosahedral Carboranes, Boranes, Metallacarboranes, and Their Derivatives
• Metallacarboranes as tunable redox potential electrochemical indicators for screening of gene mutation

Or read the article: 

Nomenclature for boranes and related species (IUPAC Recommendations 2019)
Michael A. Beckett, Bernd Brellochs, Igor T. Chizhevsky, Ture Damhus, Karl-Heinz Hellwich, John D. Kennedy, Risto Laitinen, Warren H. Powell, Daniel Rabinovich, Clara Viñas and Andrey Yerin
Pure and Applied Chemistry, 92, 2, 2019
DOI: 10.1515/pac-2018-0205 

Cover image: figures of borane structures