The Star of David, recognized as a symbol of Jewish identity and Judaism, has fascinated chemists due to its structural beauty and complexity. Over the past few decades, several strategies, including stepwise self-assembly as well as template-directed synthesis have been developed on the journey toward this challenging structure. We herein designed a direct self-assembly of 2D and 3D Star of David using a tetratopic pyridyl ligand with 180° diplatinum(II) acceptor and naked Pd2+, respectively. 2D Star of David was achieved by the self-assembly of tetratopic pyridyl-based ligand with 180° diplatinum(II) acceptor at 1:2 ratio; while the 3D Star of David was achieved by the self-assembly of ligand and Pd2+ in 1:1 ratio. It is noteworthy that the 3D Star of David contains four 2D Star of David as cross section. The molecular compositions, shapes and sizes of supramolecular complexes were characterized via multi-nuclear (1H, 13C, 31P) and multi-dimensional (COSY, NOESY, DOSY) NMR techniques, electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) as well as ion-mobility mass spectrometry (IM-MS). AFM and TEM were employed to directly visualize individual supramolecules. Finally, the stabilities of the 2D and 3D structures were measured and compared using gradient tandem-mass spectrometry (gMS2). The high stability of 3D Star of David was correlated to its high density of coordination sites (DOCS).

Self-assembly of Star of David: 2D and 3D approaches

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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