A ring-shaped molecule that hops between two sites inside a porous crystal is the first molecular shuttle to operate in a solid-state material.

Molecular shuttles could one day act as switches to store data if they are held in a well-ordered array. A team led by Stephen Loeb and Robert Schurko at the University of Windsor, Canada, built their shuttle inside a metal–organic framework (MOF): a crystalline scaffold made from metal-containing nodes connected by carbon-based struts. These struts bore a circular rotaxane molecule that moved back and forth 283 times per second at room temperature.

The estimated high density of shuttles in the MOF shows the potential for enormous data capacity if such switches can be controlled, the authors say.

Nature Chem. http://doi.org/4f2 (2015)