Giant regular polyhedra from calixarene carboxylates and uranyl
Open Access
- 1 January 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 3 (1), 785
- https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1793
Abstract
Self-assembly of large multi-component systems is a common strategy for the bottom-up construction of discrete, well-defined, nanoscopic-sized cages. Icosahedral or pseudospherical viral capsids, built up from hundreds of identical proteins, constitute typical examples of the complexity attained by biological self-assembly. Chemical versions of the so-called 5 Platonic regular or 13 Archimedean semi-regular polyhedra are usually assembled combining molecular platforms with metals with commensurate coordination spheres. Here we report novel, self-assembled cages, using the conical-shaped carboxylic acid derivatives of calix[4]arene and calix[5]arene as ligands, and the uranyl cation UO22+ as a metallic counterpart, which coordinates with three carboxylates at the equatorial plane, giving rise to hexagonal bipyramidal architectures. As a result, octahedral and icosahedral anionic metallocages of nanoscopic dimensions are formed with an unusually small number of components.This publication has 44 references indexed in Scilit:
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