Switchable molecular tweezers: design and applications

Pablo Msellem; Maksym Dekthiarenko; Nihal Hadj Seyd; Guillaume Vives

doi:10.3762/bjoc.20.45

Switchable molecular tweezers: design and applications

Beilstein J Org Chem. 2024 Mar 1:20:504-539. doi: 10.3762/bjoc.20.45. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Pablo Msellem^#¹, Maksym Dekthiarenko^#¹, Nihal Hadj Seyd^#¹, Guillaume Vives¹

Affiliation

¹ Sorbonne Université, UMR CNRS 8232, Institut Parisien de Chimie Moléculaire, 4 place Jussieu, 75005, Paris, France.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Switchable molecular tweezers are a unique class of molecular switches that, like their macroscopic analogs, exhibit mechanical motion between an open and closed conformation in response to stimuli. Such systems constitute an essential component of artificial molecular machines. This review will present selected examples of switchable molecular tweezers and their potential applications. The first part will be devoted to chemically responsive tweezers, including stimuli such as pH, metal coordination, and anion binding. Then, redox-active and photochemical tweezers will be presented.

Keywords: coordination; molecular recognition; molecular switches; photoswitch; redox; supramolecular chemistry.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

Financial support from ANR MULTIFUN (ANR-21-CE07-0013), Emergence Sorbonne Universités CoMM, and iSiM Switchgel are acknowledged. This project has received funding through the MSCA4Ukraine project, which is funded by the European Union.