Issue 5, 2019

Ionic organic cage-encapsulating phase-transferable metal clusters

Abstract

Exploration of metal clusters (MCs) adaptive to both aqueous and oil phases without disturbing their size is promising for a broad scope of applications. The state-of-the-art approach via ligand-binding may perturb MCs' size due to varied metal–ligand binding strength when shuttling between solvents of different polarity. Herein, we applied physical confinement of a series of small noble MCs (<1 nm) inside ionic organic cages (I-Cages), which by means of anion exchange enables reversible transfer of MCs between aqueous and hydrophobic solutions without varying their ultrasmall size. Moreover, the MCs@I-Cage hybrid serves as a recyclable, reaction-switchable catalyst featuring high activity in liquid-phase NH3BH3 (AB) hydrolysis reaction with a turnover frequency (TOF) of 115 min−1.

Graphical abstract: Ionic organic cage-encapsulating phase-transferable metal clusters

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
02 Oct 2018
Accepted
17 Nov 2018
First published
19 Nov 2018
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2019,10, 1450-1456

Ionic organic cage-encapsulating phase-transferable metal clusters

S. Zhang, Z. Kochovski, H. Lee, Y. Lu, H. Zhang, J. Zhang, J. Sun and J. Yuan, Chem. Sci., 2019, 10, 1450 DOI: 10.1039/C8SC04375B

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