A class of organic cages featuring twin cavities.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34675210.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-26397-3 and PMC identifier 8531300.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
A variety of organic cages with different geometries have been developed during the last decade, most of them exhibiting a single cavity. In contrast, the number of organic cages featuring a pair of cavities remains scarce. These structures may pave the way towards novel porous materials with emergent properties and functions.We herein report on rational design of a three-dimensional hexaformyl precursor 1, which exhibits two types of conformers, i.e. Conformer-1 and -2, with different cleft positions and sizes. Aided by molecular dynamics simulations, we select two triamino conformation capturers (denoted CC). Small-sized CC-1 selectively capture Conformer-1 by matching its cleft size, while the large-sized CC-2 is able to match and capture both conformers. This strategy allows the formation of three compounds with twin cavities, which we coin diphane. The self-assembly of diphane units results in superstructures with tunable proton conductivity, which reaches up to 1.37×10<sup>-5</sup> S cm<sup>-1</sup>.