Nov 09, 2020
(Nanowerk News) Famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí once said, “Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of nature.”
Among different man-made architectures and art, spherical structures and shapes have been the most fantastical geometrical form that fascinated the figments of the human imagination.
Making perfect spherical architectures is challenging due to their geometric purity and technical complexity and therefore these structures are both enchanting as well as rare. On one hand, perhaps inspired by the huge celestial bodies, architects like Fuller have designed geodesic dome structures such as the Montreal Biosphère; on the other side, there are chemists who are the architects of the world’s most miniature aesthetic structures.
The latter draw most of their inspiration from the complex self-assembled structures present in nature such as the highly symmetric hollow spherical virus capsids and protein cages.
Figure 1: 3D structure of porphyrin-based gigantic organic cages composed of multi-porphyrin units. (Image: IBS)
Making such purely organic, atomically precise hollow molecular spheres or cages is synthetically challenging.
Previous approaches for constructing pure organic cages usually allowed the formation of small-sized organic cages (cavity diameter
Figure 1: 3D structure of porphyrin-based gigantic organic cages composed of multi-porphyrin units. (Image: IBS)
Making such purely organic, atomically precise hollow molecular spheres or cages is synthetically challenging.
Previous approaches for constructing pure organic cages usually allowed the formation of small-sized organic cages (cavity diameter 