Hosting anions. The energetic perspective

Hosting anions addresses the widely spread molecular recognition event of negatively charged species by dedicated organic compounds in condensed phases at equilibrium. The experimentally accessible energetic features comprise the entire system including the solvent, any buffers, background electrolytes or other components introduced for e.g. analysis. The deconvolution of all these interaction types and their dependence on subtle structural variation is required to arrive at a structure-energy correlation that may serve as a guide in receptor construction. The focus on direct host-guest interactions (lock-and-key complementarity) that have dominated the binding concepts of artificial receptors in the past must be widened in order to account for entropic contributions which constitute very significant fractions of the total free energy of interaction. Including entropy necessarily addresses the ambiguity and fuzziness of the host-guest structural ensemble and requires the appreciation of the fact that most liquid phases possess distinct structures of their own. Apparently, it is the perturbation of the intrinsic solvent structure occurring upon association that rules ion binding in polar media where ions are soluble and abundant. Rather than specifying peculiar structural elements useful in anion binding this critical review attempts an illumination of the concepts and individual energetic contributions resulting in the final observation of specific anion recognition (95 references).