Researchers achieve guest-driven self-assembly and chiral induction of photofunctional lanthanide tetrahedral cages

Chiral coordination cages have potential applications in enantioselective recognition, sensing and symmetric catalysis. In general, chiral coordination cages can be synthesized either by starting from enantiopure ligands/metal-organic precursors or post assembly resolution/modification with chiral auxiliaries. Due to the paucity of structures and their limited cavities, host-guest chemical properties of lanthanide-organic cages still need to be explored, especially based on noncovalent host-guest interaction, the stereoselective synthesis strategy of lanthanide-organic cages induced by chiral guest as template has not been reported.