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Updated: Aug 12, 2025

Synthesis of a Water-soluble Metal–Organic Complex Array
Published on: October 8, 2016
Designing narcissistic self-sorting terpyridine moieties with high coordination selectivity for complex
Jianjun Ma1, Tong Lu1, Xiaozheng Duan2
1State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin, 130012, China.
Abstract:
Coordination-driven self-assembly is a powerful approach for the construction of metallosupramolecules, but designing coordination moieties that can drive the self-assembly with high selectivity and specificity remains a challenge. Here we report two ortho-modified terpyridine ligands that form head-to-tail coordination complexes with Zn(II). Both complexes show narcissistic self-sorting behaviour. In addition, starting from these ligands, we obtain two sterically congested multitopic ligands and use them to construct more complex metallo-supramolecules hexagons. Because of the non-coaxial structural restrictions in the rotation of terpyridine moieties, these hexagonal macrocycles can hierarchically self-assemble into giant cyclic nanostructures via edge-to-edge stacking, rather than face-to-face stacking. Our design of dissymmetrical coordination moieties from congested coordination pairs show remarkable self-assembly selectivity and specificity.
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