Multinuclear transition metal assemblies, large supramolecules containing more than one type of metal atom, show great promise in many areas, such as molecular devices, catalysts and host-guest chemistry.  It is no surprise, therefore, that there is currently a lot of interest in achieving greater control over their design and synthesis.

Professor Guo-Xin Jin, from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, is seeking such control by the novel use of dodecaborane molecules containing sulphur coordinated to metal complexes.  The resultant half sandwich carborane compounds are versatile building blocks for supramolecular assemblies, and in his Dalton Transactions Perspective, Jin describes the use of these building blocks with pyridine based ligands to form a variety of different structural types of compounds, from dimers, to trimers, to tetramers, all of which form channelled structures in the solid state.

'We anticipate the design and synthetic strategy for a class of self-assemblies with ancillary carboranyl groups to be a noteworthy approach', says Jin, ' for the variety of coordination motifs with novel structural patterns'.

Carboranes as useful supramolecular building blocks