Bifunctional Metal-Organic Nanoballs Featuring Lewis Acidic and Basic Sites as a New Platform for One-Pot Tandem Catalysis

Gaurav Verma; Sanjay Kumar; Elliott R Slaughter; Harsh Vardhan; Thamraa M Alshahrani; Zheng Niu; Wen-Yang Gao; Lukasz Wojtas; Yu-Sheng Chen; Shengqian Ma

doi:10.1002/cplu.202400169

Bifunctional Metal-Organic Nanoballs Featuring Lewis Acidic and Basic Sites as a New Platform for One-Pot Tandem Catalysis

Chempluschem. 2024 Apr 5:e202400169. doi: 10.1002/cplu.202400169. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of North Texas, 1508 W Mulberry St., Denton, Texas, 76201, USA.
² Department of Chemistry, Multani Mal Modi College, Modi College, Lower Mall, Patiala, Punjab, 147001, India.
³ Texas Academy of Mathematics and Sciences, University of North Texas, 1508 W Mulberry St., Denton, Texas, 76201, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, Texas, 77005-1827, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics, College of Science, Princess Nourahbint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, 11564, SaudiArabia.
⁶ College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, 215123, People's Republic of China.
⁷ Chemistry & Biochemistry Department, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, 45701, USA.
⁸ Department of Chemistry, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave, Tampa, Florida, 33620, USA.
⁹ ChemMatCARS, Center for Advanced Radiation Sources, The University of Chicago, 9700 South Cass Avenue, Argonne, Illinois, 60439, USA.

PMID: 38578649
DOI: 10.1002/cplu.202400169

Abstract

The design and synthesis of polyhedra using coordination-driven self-assembly has been an intriguing research area for synthetic chemists. Metal-organic polyhedra are a class of intricate molecular architectures that have garnered significant attention in the literature due to their diverse structures and potential applications. Hereby, we report Cu-MOP, a bifunctional metal-organic cuboctahedra built using 2,6-dimethylpyridine-3,5-dicarboxylic acid and copper acetate at room temperature. The presence of both Lewis basic pyridine groups and Lewis acidic copper sites imparts catalytic activity to Cu-MOP for the tandem one-pot deacetalization-Knoevenagel/Henry reactions. The effect of solvent system and time duration on the yields of the reactions was studied, and the results illustrate the promising potential of these metal-organic cuboctahedra, also known as nanoballs for applications in catalysis.

Keywords: bifunctional; deacetalization-Knoevenagel reaction; metal-organic polyhedra; nanoballs; tandem catalysis.

Abstract

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