Archive for October 13th, 2016

Catenated atoms and groups.

Thursday, October 13th, 2016

Chemists are as fond of records as any, although I doubt you will find many chemical ones in the Guinness world records list. Polytriangulanes chase how many cyclopropyl 3-rings can be joined via a vertex. Steve Bachrach on his blog reports some recent work by Peter Schreiner and colleagues[1] and the record for catenation of such rings appears to be 15. This led me to think about some other common atoms and groups. Here I have searched for crystal structures only; there may be examples of course for which no such data has been reported.

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References

  1. W.D. Allen, H. Quanz, and P.R. Schreiner, "Polytriangulane", Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, vol. 12, pp. 4707-4716, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.6b00669