Molybdenum Blue was a 200 year old mystery until their molecular structures was unveiled in the 1990’s.1 In the last twenty years, there have been a number of reports on the assembly and characterization of new Mo Blue composites with various types of guests via supramolecular interactions.2 Rare work has been carried on Mo Blue structures modified by direct bonding to hetero metal ions or organic ligands. In this contribution, we present new progress in covalent modification of Mo Blue with amino acids. As an example, Scheme 1 below shows a synthetic strategy using lanthanide ions to break the high symmetries of typical Mo Blue clusters and using amino acid ligands to introduce chirality. In this way, we obtained a series of chiral Mo Blue clusters constructed by using the synergetic effect of the symmetry breaker and chirality introducer. It was verified that both lanthanide ions and amino acids are essential for obtaining chiral Mo Blues, and nether lanthanide ions nor amino acids themselves alone can lead to the formation of enantiopure chiral Mo Blues but racemic or centrosymmetric entities.3-4

Covalent modification of molybdenum-blue polyoxomolybdates with amino acids

256th National Meeting (2018)

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