Coaching catalysis
Our ChemSci Pick of the Week uses chiral cages to guide the formation of non-covalent molecular complexes, working in a similar way to enzymes in nature.
To run an analogy, imagine the end result if a crowd of people was to organise itself into a football team. Now, imagine if a talented coach were on hand to help assemble the team. Needless to say, the latter would be a more effective process.
In this piece of research, members of the crowd are molecules, and the coaches are chiral cages. The end result isn’t a well-organised football team – but well-organised molecular assemblies.
And then, similar to the merry-go-round of Premier League football managers, the chiral cages can simply detach and start again with another group.
Professor Xiaoyu Cao, from Xiamen University in China, said that the Chemical Science paper was the result of seven years of research, and follows a 2014 publication in RSC journal Chemical Society Reviews.
Cao said: "To refer to catalysed assembly processes, we suggested a new term: "catassembly". We envisioned catassembly is important to molecular assembly, just as catalysis to chemical reaction."
Molecular assembly can be regarded as multi-step non-covalent synthesis, creating complex molecular systems to bridge the gap between molecules and life systems. However, most molecular assembly processes involve mainly the building blocks, and any artificial “catalysis” counterparts are rare.
And while other research has shown that chiral cages are effective catalysts for covalent reactions, this is the first demonstration of their effectiveness for supramolecular polymerisation.
"This piece of research proves that catassembly can be an efficient way to develop artificial molecular systems, and will increase researchers’ interests to discover more catassembly processes in life sciences, developing artificial, sophisticated, and more functional molecular systems. It may interest researchers in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and functional materials," Cao added.
In the Chemical Science paper, the team demonstrated this using acid-stable chiral imine cages to catalyse the supramolecular polymerisation of TPPS (tetrakis(4-sulfonatophenyl)-porphyrin)) as a representative non-covalent assembly system.
Cao hopes that this will attract more attention to the catassembler, thus providing an alternative approach to manipulating and modulating the complex molecular systems which can be used in nano- and micro-fabrication.
This article is free to read in our open access, flagship journal Chemical Science: Yu Wang, Yibin Sun et al., Chem. Sci., 2019, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/C9SC02412C. You can access our 2019 ChemSci Picks in this article collection.
ChemSci Pick of the Week
Chemical Science is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry and publishes findings of exceptional significance from across the chemical sciences. It is a global journal for the discovery and reporting of breakthroughs in basic chemical research, communicated to a worldwide audience without barriers, through open access. All article publication charges have been waived, meaning that the journal is free to read and free to publish.
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