A BEAUTIFUL MELD

Abstract

WHETHER PLANT BREEDER or chemist, hybridizers hope to blend the best features of the parents into optimal offspring. That's what a team of scientists in Japan has accomplished with the creation of a benzene-silica hybrid that assembles itself into a crystalline mesoporous material. The new material exhibits the periodic array of medium-sized pores that have made inorganic mesoporous molecular sieves so useful. Most striking, the pore walls themselves are completely regular, composed of orderly layers of benzene rings linked to alternating layers of silicate chains. The benzene rings can be functionalized, opening the door to the vast range of organic transformations that can lead to specially tailored properties { Nature , 416 ,304(2002)}. To date, all conventional mesoporous materials have had amorphous pore-wall structures that restrict their applications, notes chemist Shinji Inagaki, leader of the Frontier Research Group at Toyota Central R&D Laboratories, Nagakute. Inagaki synthesized and character...