Abstract
Nature embraces the principles of supramolecular chemistry, exploiting noncovalent interactions and coordination chemistry in various ways to facilitate all biological processes. Inspired by nature, the assembly of complex synthetic systems in both solution and the solid state is becoming increasingly feasible. This often requires that known systems be modeled, explored, and fine-tuned in order to develop further systems of even higher complexity. Examples include the construction of globular self-assembled molecular capsules, which have potential applications as drug delivery agents, gas storage containers and catalytic nano-reactors. Moreover, fine-tuning porosity in such assemblies have expanded the scope of these systems to include gas and petrochemicals separation. Our approach to this class of functional self-assembled structures includes employing a “window construction” technique, which provides a new class of materials with intrinsic microporosity. Simple hydrogen bonding and/ or metal coordination were employed to construct a library of these suprastructures, which showed excellent selectivity towards gas separations together with easily tunable pore size. This talk will present an overview of the systems obtained so far and their applications in energy intensive separations and protein encapsulation/delivery.