Non-heme iron, vanadium, and copper complexes bearing hemicryptophane cavities were evaluated in the oxidation of methane in water by hydrogen peroxide. According to 1 H nuclear magnetic resonance studies, a hydrophobic hemicryptophane cage accommodates a methane molecule in the proximity of the oxidizing site, leading to an improvement in the efficiency and selectivity for CH 3 OH and CH 3 OOH compared to those of the analogous complexes devoid of a hemicryptophane cage. While copper complexes showed low catalytic efficiency, their vanadium and iron counterparts exhibited higher turnover numbers, ≤13.2 and ≤9.2, respectively, providing target primary oxidation products (CH 3 OH and CH 3 OOH) as well as over-oxidation products (HCHO and HCOOH). In the case of caged vanadium complexes, the confinement effect was found to improve either the selectivity for CH 3 OH and CH 3 OOH (≤15%) or the catalytic efficiency. The confined space of the hydrophobic pocket of iron-based supramolecular complexes plays a significant role in the improvement of both the selectivity (≤27% for CH 3 OH and CH 3 OOH) and the turnover number of methane oxidation. These results indicate that the supramolecular approach is a promising strategy for the development of efficient and selective bioinspired catalysts for the mild oxidation of methane to methanol.
Two new supramolecular complexes consisting of an achiral bisporphyrin host and a chiral diamine guest are reported. One shows a remarkably high amplitude bisignate CD signal while the other one shows a very low value. X-ray structure and other spectroscopic investigations of the tweezer complexes clearly rationalize the origin of the optical activity that has so far remained an unresolved issue.
We report here the synthesis of a new chiral Zn(II) bisporphyrin tweezer in which two achiral Zn(II) porphyrin moieties are covalently linked by (1R,2R)-diphenylethylenediamine, which produces a strong chiral field around the porphyrin moieties. The chiral tweezer exhibits not only intensity modulation in UV-vis and CD exciton couplets but also a dramatic change, namely, the inversion in the sign of the interporphyrin helicity upon binding of achiral diamines of varying lengths. The stoichiometry-controlled formation of a 1:1 sandwich complex followed by a 1:2 open complex was realized with smaller achiral diamines (n: 2-5) at their low and high concentration regions, respectively, leading to two-step inversion of chirality. With longer achiral diamines (n: 6-8), however, only 1:1 sandwich complexes are formed with no change of sign in the CD couplet. As compared to a 1:2 open complex, a 1:1 sandwich complex shows an enhanced CD response as two porphyrin units come closer in space. Structural insights of the host-guest complexes have been obtained spectroscopically along with molecular mechanics minimizations with the newly implemented OPLS-3 force field followed by geometry optimization using density functional theory of the most stable conformer. The amide bridge in the Zn(II) bisporphyrin has a low rotational barrier, which provides conformational flexibility to change interporphyrin helicity between 1:1 and 1:2 binding depending on the size of the achiral guests in order to minimize host-guest steric interactions.
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