Designing Permeable Molecular Crystals That React with External Agents to Give Crystalline Products

Abstract

Permeable molecular crystals can be specifically designed to let external agents enter, react, and produce single crystals of new substances, with retention of the original crystalline architecture (see picture). Such topotactic processes can be made to cross-link molecular crystals covalently, thus capturing temporary supramolecular constructs as permanent crystalline macromolecular replicas.