The ninth Dalton Discussion meeting was held from 19-21 April, 2006 at the University of Manchester, UK. Dalton Discussion meetings focus on research at the cutting edge of inorganic chemistry. DD9: Functional Molecular Assemblies, brought together some of the world leaders in this area of research for an intensive, two day meeting.

The meeting was divided into four sessions, each on a different topic. The opening session looked at 'Constructing hybrid materials.' The Keynote presentation in this session was given by Bart Jan Ravoo on 'Writing with molecules on molecular printboards'-work carried out with David Reinhoudt at the University of Twente.
Session two focused on 'Molecular magnetism and quantum information processing' and was opened with a Keynote presentation by Joel Miller from the University of Utah on 'Magnetically ordered molecule-based assemblies.'

Makoto Fujita from the University of Tokyo was the third Keynote speaker, giving a presentation entitled 'Control of molecular interactions by the hollow of coordination cages' to open session three on 'Self-assembly.' 

The final session was centred on the area of sensors and molecular recognition with a Keynote lecture given by David Parker from Durham University on the topic of 'Engineering emissive europium and terbium complexes for molecular imaging and sensing.'

All of the work presented at the Discussion meeting is published in the papers in issue 23, 2006 of Dalton Transactions. To see the full contents list for this issue just click on the link below.