Supramolecular chemistry is a prevailing branch to aid us in generating fascinating architectures resulting from covalent as well as non-covalent interactions. The coordination driven self-assembly further offers the opportunity to prepare structures with predetermined shape, size and symmetry. Nanoballs are discrete structures generally composed of metal (II) paddlewheels bridged at an angle of 120° by the angular bifunctional ligand benzene-1,3-dicarboxylate (bdc) or its derivatives. They offer a vast potential for various applications such as guest inclusion, adsorption and separation; drug delivery, sensing and catalysis but remain relatively underexplored compared to their metal organic framework (MOF) counterparts. Further, the development of a catalytic system with multiple functionalities in the nanoball architecture for sequential synthesis is still unprecedented. We hereby report a bifunctional discrete metal-organic cuboctahedra CuMOP-47 constructed from 2,6-dimethylpyridine-3,5-dicarboxylic acid and copper acetate at room temperature. The synthesis of this discrete architecture is high yielding and it exhibits highly efficient catalysis for one pot deacetalization-Knoevenagel reaction of benzaldehyde diacetal and malononitrile.The catalyst is also separated easily by centrifugation and can be recovered in good amounts. This also opens a new platform into utilizing these nanoball architectures for tandem catalysis.

Nanoballs featuring Lewis acidic and basic sites as efficient bifunctional catalysts for tandem deacetalization-Knovenagel reaction

2019 Fall National Meeting

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