Novel macrocycles – and old ones doing new tricks

Abstract

Macrocycles [1] are the workhorses in supramolecular chemistry. Many basic supramolecular concepts have been developed through studying crown ethers, cryptands, podands and spherands in the 1970s and 1980s. For these contributions, Charles Pedersen, Donald J. Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987. In the 80s and 90s, Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir Fraser Stoddart used macrocycles to realize machine-like molecular motion, and they shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016 with Ben Feringa. Clearly, macrocycles played a central role for the fundamental science that established supramolecular chemistry as an independent field of chemical research as well as for its applications in contemporary research on functional supramolecules and materials.