Reactivity of metal complexes in confined spaces – CONFICAT

The CONFICAT project aims at exploring the reactivity of transition metal (particularly gold) complexes in confined environments. The main concept is to generate, stabilize and use cationic metal complexes within anionic supramolecular cages. Although this strategy has started to be explored recently, it is so far restricted to a single anionic cage and small model gold complexes with little catalytic relevance. The lack of large, modulable and stable anionic cages is a serious bottleneck to develop this concept further. Therefore, this project first aims at preparing anionic polyhydroxyarene and truxene cages with different sizes, and at studying their host properties. With these cages in hand, two different problematics will be explored in order to substantiate the beneficial effect of confinement, namely oxidative addition to gold and gold-catalyzed macrocyclizations. The CONFICAT project seeks to progress our understanding of confinement effects in supramolecular catalysis, but also to benefit from the confinement-driven reactivity and selectivity in a useful but challenging catalytic transformation.