Supramolecular Chirogenesis Induced by Platinum(II) Tweezers with Excellent Environmental Tolerance

Supramolecular chirogenesis has emerged as an effective strategy to access symmetry breaking in artificial systems. However, the chirogenic signals suffer from high susceptibility toward environmental variations. An effective strategy has been developed to address this issue by constructing platinum(II)-based tweezer/guest complexes stabilized by two-fold donor-acceptor and Pt^II -Pt^II metal-metal interactions. Upon guest encapsulation, the two pincers on the achiral Pt^II tweezer undergo a stereospecific twist to minimize steric repulsion, thus locking tweezer/guest complexes into the preferred chiral conformations. The induced chiroptical effects display outstanding solvent and temperature tolerance, ascribed to the balance between electrostatic and desolvation effects for the involved non-covalent interactions. Moreover, hierarchical and multi-component supramolecular assembly of tweezer/guest complexes provide a convenient way to modulate chirogeneic signals for their intensities.