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Self-assembly of nanoscale cuboctahedra by coordination chemistry

Nature volume 398, pages 796–799 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Self-assembled polyhedral structures are common in biology. The coats of many viruses, for example, have a structure based on icosahedral symmetry1. The preparation of synthetic polyhedral molecular assemblies represents a challenging problem, but supramolecular chemistry2,3,4 has now advanced to the point where the task may be addressed. Macromolecular and supramolecular entities of predefined geometric shape and with well-defined internal environments are potentially important for inclusion phenomena5,6,7,8, molecular recognition5,6 and catalysis9. Here we report the use of self-assembly of molecular units driven by coordination to transition-metal ions10 to prepare a cuboctahedron from 20 tridentate and bidentate subunits in a single step. The cuboctahedron is an archimedean semiregular polyhedron that combines square and triangular faces. Our self-assembled polyhedral capsules, characterized by NMR and electrospray mass spectrometry, are around 5 nanometres in diameter.

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Figure 1: The general design scheme for the cuboctahedron.
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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 84112, Utah, USA

    Bogdan Olenyuk, Jeffery A. Whiteford, Andreas Fechtenkötter & Peter J. Stang

Authors
  1. Bogdan Olenyuk
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  2. Jeffery A. Whiteford
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  3. Andreas Fechtenkötter
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  4. Peter J. Stang
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Correspondence to Peter J. Stang.

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Olenyuk, B., Whiteford, J., Fechtenkötter, A. et al. Self-assembly of nanoscale cuboctahedra by coordination chemistry. Nature 398, 796–799 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/19740

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