Posts Tagged ‘van der Lee’

Solid carbon dioxide: hexacoordinate carbon?

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Carbon dioxide is much in the news, not least because its atmospheric concentration is on the increase. How to sequester it and save the planet is a hot topic. Here I ponder its solid state structure, as a hint to its possible reactivity, and hence perhaps for clues as to how it might be captured. The structure was determined (DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.65.104103) as shown below.

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Reactions in supramolecular cavities – trapping a cyclobutadiene: ! or ?

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Cavities promote reactions, and they can also trap the products of reactions. Such (supramolecular) chemistry is used to provide models for how enzymes work, but it also allows un-natural reactions to be undertaken. A famous example is the preparation of P4 (see blog post here), an otherwise highly reactive species which, when trapped in the cavity is now sufficiently protected from the ravages of oxygen for its X-ray structure to be determined. A colleague recently alerted me to a just-published article by Legrand, van der Lee and Barboiu (DOI: 10.1126/science.1188002) who report the use of cavities to trap and stabilize the notoriously (self)reactive 1,3-dimethylcyclobutadiene (3/4 in the scheme below). Again sequestration by the host allowed an x-ray determination of  the captured species!

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