Molecular knots occur in DNA, proteins, and other macromolecules. However, the benefits that can potentially arise from tying molecules in knots are, for the most part, unclear. Here, we report on a synthetic molecular pentafoil knot that allosterically initiates or regulates catalyzed chemical reactions by controlling the in situ generation of a carbocation formed through the knot-promoted cleavage of a carbon-halogen bond. The knot architecture is crucial to this function because it restricts the conformations that the molecular chain can adopt and prevents the formation of catalytically inactive species upon metal ion binding. Unknotted analogs are not catalytically active. Our results suggest that knotting molecules may be a useful strategy for reducing the degrees of freedom of flexible chains, enabling them to adopt what are otherwise thermodynamically inaccessible functional conformations.

Knots may ultimately prove just as versatile and useful at the nanoscale as at the macroscale. However, the lack of synthetic routes to all but the simplest molecular knots currently prevents systematic investigation of the influence of knotting at the molecular level. We found that it is possible to assemble four building blocks into three braided ligand strands. Octahedral iron(II) ions control the relative positions of the three strands at each crossing point in a circular triple helicate, while structural constraints on the ligands determine the braiding connections. This approach enables two-step assembly of a molecular 8 knot featuring eight nonalternating crossings in a 192-atom closed loop ~20 nanometers in length. The resolved metal-free 8 knot enantiomers have pronounced features in their circular dichroism spectra resulting solely from topological chirality.

The Stokes-Einstein expression of the diffusion coefficient as a function of the hydrodynamic radius of the diffusing object does not explicitly carry the mass dependency of the object. It is possible to correlate the translational self-diffusion coefficients D with the molecular weight M for an ensemble of cyclic or hollow clusters ranging from about 200 to 30,000 g x mol(-1). From this correlation, the mass of a cluster can be deduced from its diffusion coefficient. Consistency of diffusion as a power law of mass and Stokes-Einstein formulation is completely fulfilled with the selected compounds of this contribution.