Cover Picture: ZAAC ‐ Journal of Inorganic and General Chemistry 8‐9/2013

The cover picture shows a collage of figures from articles in this Special Issue on Bioinorganic Chemistry. The diversity and broadness of this highly relevant interdisciplinary field of chemistry are presented. It is hard to imagine that before 1980 the idea that metal ions could play a crucial role in biology and medicine, was only believed by very few people, despite the fact that the relevance of iron in blood was known for ages. Metal ions occurring in, or applied on, living systems, have either a crucial/beneficial role, a toxic/medicinal role, or an inert/diagnostic role. To understand these roles, and make use of it in detoxification, catalysis, design of new drugs, or design of diagnostic agents, it is required to have a good knowledge of inorganic and coordination chemistry. One hundred years after the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Alfred Werner, for his breakthrough in realizing that the coordination number can be larger than the oxidation state of a metal, bioinorganic chemistry also obeys to this principle. In this issue, a collection of articles – written by scientists worldwide – covers a variety of subtopics, dealing with metal ions in living systems, as well as biomimetic studies inspired by metal ions in biology. The interplay between inorganic chemistry on one hand, and medicine and biology on the other hand is visible in several papers.