Adventures in Supramolecular Chemistry: Self-Assembly of Metallosupramolecular Cages, Active Metal Template Synthesis of Rotaxanes and Molecular Machines

Since the award of the Nobel prize to Pedersen, Cram and Lehn three decades ago the field of supramolecular chemistry has grown immensely. Indeed, supramolecular systems are beginning to show promise in a wide range of different areas including molecular recognition, encapsulation, drug delivery, catalysis, molecular electronics, sensing and molecular machines. My group has interests in two main areas of supramolecular chemistry: metallosupramolecular architectures1 and molecular machines.2 This presentation will examine our recent efforts to develop functional supramolecular systems in these areas.
The first part of the presentation describes our efforts in the development of functional metallo- cages. The underlying principles for the generation of well-defined multimetallic coordination architectures are now well understood and these have been exploited to generate a wide range of complex metallosupramolecular architectures.1 With this diverse range of structures readily available, research focus has shifted away from simply making new architectures to generating functional systems and exploiting their properties. We have developed a family of functional metallo-cage3 systems using palladium(II) ions and examined their molecular recognition properties including the binding of the anticancer drug cisplatin.
Nanoscale (supra)molecular machines are critical for the functioning of biological systems.2 Inspired by these systems chemists have begun to generate synthetic analogues. Molecular machines based on both mechanically interlocked architectures (MIAs) and non-interlocked molecules have been developed and the pioneering work in this area led to the award of the 2016 Nobel prize in Chemistry to Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa. The second part of the presentation will describe our efforts to generate synthetic molecular actuators using both interlocked4 and non-interlocked5 systems.