Trans-spanning_ligand
Trans-spanning ligands are bidentate ligands that can span opposite sites of a complex with square-planar geometry. A wide variety of ligands that chelate in the cis fashion already exist, but very few can link opposite vertices on a coordination polyhedron. Early attempts to generate trans-spanning bidentate ligands relied on long hydrocarbon chains to link the donor functionalities, but such ligands often lead to coordination polymers.