Affiliation:
1. Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Natural Functional Molecule Chemistry of the Ministry of Education College of Chemistry and Materials Science Northwest University Xi'an 710069 China
2. Key Laboratory of Medicinal Molecule Science and Pharmaceutics Engineering Ministry of Industry and Information Technology School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Beijing Institute of Technology Beijing 100081 China
Abstract
AbstractAnion‐coordination‐driven assembly (ACDA) has proven to be a very effective strategy for the construction of polyhedral structures. Here we demonstrate that variation of the “angle” of the backbone of C3‐symmetric tris‐bis(urea) ligands, from triphenylamine to triphenylphosphine oxide, results in the change of the final construct from an A4L4 tetrahedron to a higher‐nuclearity, A6L6 trigonal antiprism (A=anion, herein PO43−; L=ligand). Most interestingly, this assembly features a huge hollow internal space that is divided into three compartments: one central cavity and two large outer pockets. This multi‐cavity character enables the binding of different guests, namely monosaccharides or polyethylene glycol molecules (PEG600, PEG1000 and PEG2000), respectively. The results prove that anion coordination by multiple hydrogen bonds may provide both sufficient strength and flexibility, thus making possible the formation of complicated structures with adaptive guest binding ability.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China