Giant regular polyhedra from calixarene carboxylates and uranyl

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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. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

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Pasquale, S., Sattin, S., Escudero-Adán, E. C., Martínez-Belmonte, M., & De Mendoza, J. (2012). Giant regular polyhedra from calixarene carboxylates and uranyl. Nature Communications, 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1793

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