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Updated: Jul 5, 2026

Design, Synthesis, and Photochemical Properties of Clickable Caged Compounds
Published on: October 15, 2019
An Hg2+-gated chiral molecular switch created by using binaphthalene molecules with two anthracene units and two
Cheng Wang1, Deqing Zhang, Guanxin Zhang
1Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Organic Solids Laboratory Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, P.R. China.
Abstract:
By integrating the features of anthracene, 1,3-dithiole-2-thione, and binaphthalene units, (S)-1 and its analogue (S)-2, which contains two 1,3-dithiole-2-one units instead of 1,3-dithiole-2-thione, were studied for creating a new molecular regulation system and building a gated chiral molecular switch. The results show that the photodimerization is controlled by the remote functional-group transformation of C=S into C=O, thus providing an elegant example of molecular regulation. The photodimerization of two anthracene units induces circular dichroism (CD) spectral variation. Overall, the CD spectrum can be remotely modulated by Hg2+ in (S)-1, which leads to an Hg2+-gated chiral molecular switch.
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