Foldamers are “artificial folded molecular architectures” which are stabilized by a collection of noncovalent interactions between nonadjacent monomeric units and/or hostguest interactions. They have found applications in many fields, such as molecular recognition, catalysis, and materials science. Anion binding foldamers are of great biological significance because they may potentially mimic the functions of natural anion channels or anion ransporters. However, there are a few examples that fall into his category and information of the exact folding dimensions and other structural features of most anion-binding foldamers remains rare due to the lack of crystal tructures.

Researchers from Northwest University and Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics have synthesized a series of dinuclear chloride-binding foldamers based on o-phenyl-bridged oligoureas. A growing tendency for dinuclear foldamers was elucidated with the increasing number of urea units.

This work further proves the strategy for designing anion ligands by simply translating the well developed transition-metal ligands to anion binding scaffolds, which have been successful in the construction of novel anion-based architectures.

The work has received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The findings have been published in Org. Lett.(Org. Lett., Vol. 14, No. 3, 2012).