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Ligand bond number represents the effective total number of ligands or ligand attachment points surrounding a metal center, labeled M. More simply, it represents the number of coordination sites occupied on the metal. Based on the covalent bond classification method , the equation for determining ligand bond number is as follows:
Where L represents the number of neutral ligands adding two electrons to the metal center [typically lone electron pairs, pi-bonds and sigma bonds. Most encountered ligands will fall under this category. X represents covalent-bonding ligands such as halogen anions. Z represents, though rarely encountered electron accepting ligands or dative bond forming ligands. The ligand bond number convention is most commonly encountered within inorganic chemistry and it's related fields organometallic chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry.