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Metal-organic cages containing two types of binding sites: trapping hydrocarbon gas in solution

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Abstract

The design and synthesis of artificial molecular containers for the encapsulation of hydrocarbon gases to study their host-guest chemistry are highly important for potential application in gas storage, separation, and understanding of their biological functions. In this work, we report the subcomponent self-assembly of four cubic Zn8L12Br4 (HL = N-(4-R)-1-(5-methyl-1H-imidazole-4-yl)methanimine) cages with good solubility in chloroform, which are capable of binding hydrocarbon gases including methane, ethane, and ethene in solution at ambient temperature. Two types of gas binding sites (one is in the cavity, and the other is at the window) are discovered in these cages, which are documented by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Their performance of encapsulation of hydrocarbon gases can be tuned by carefully adjusting substituent groups. These metal-organic cages containing two types of binding sites provide new artificial models to mimic the structures and functions of biological systems in binding and transforming hydrocarbon gases.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22171106, 21871172, 22101099, 21731002), Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Research (2019B030302009), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (21622103), Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (2022A1515011937), Guangzhou Science and Technology Program (202002030411), the Special Fund Project for Science and Technology of Guangdong (STKJ2021172), and Jinan University. We thank the high-performance public computing service platform of Jinan University for the supporting of computational resources.

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  1. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Chemistry and Materials Science, and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Functional Supramolecular Coordination Materials and Applications, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 510632, China

    Meng-Ying Sun, Mo Xie, Chuang-Wei Zhou, Xue-Zhi Wang, Zhao-Xia Lian, Zi-Ye Chen, Xiao-Ping Zhou & Dan Li

  2. Department of Chemistry, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, 999077, China

    Meng-Ying Sun

  3. Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, 515041, China

    Yong-Liang Huang

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  1. Meng-Ying Sun
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  2. Mo Xie
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Correspondence to Xiao-Ping Zhou.

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Sun, MY., Xie, M., Zhou, CW. et al. Metal-organic cages containing two types of binding sites: trapping hydrocarbon gas in solution. Sci. China Chem. 66, 2004–2010 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-023-1600-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-023-1600-1

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