Abstract
Macrocyclic compounds have been studied extensively as the host molecules in supramolecular chemistry. Their structural characteristics make macrocycles desirable in the field of molecular recognition, which is the key to high catalytic efficiencies of natural enzymes. Therefore, macrocycles are ideal building blocks for the design of bioinspired catalysts. This mini review highlights recent advances ranging from single-molecule to metal-organic framework materials, exhibiting multilevel macrocycle catalysts with unique catalytic centers and substrate-binding affinities.
Highlights
Natural enzymes are innately endowed with substrate-binding sites, which are essential for the formation of enzyme-substrate complex and crossing the activation energy barrier of catalytic reactions
From the perspective of supramolecular chemistry, many synthetic macrocycles provide the structural feature of substate-binding sites, which leads to a broad application of macrocyclic compounds in the areas of ion recognition (Ding et al, 2017), gas storage (Zhou et al, 2020), stimuli-responsive materials (Lei et al, 2020), drug delivery (Webber and Langer, 2017), and catalysis (Pairault et al, 2020)
Porphyrin is a heteroatom-containing macrocyclic compound constructed by four pyrrole units which are connected by four methines as the bridge and are in a planar conformation to form 18π electrons conjugation system, and porphyrin can coordinate with many metals to form metallated porphyrins with extensive applications in many scientific fields, such as catalytic reaction and chemosensors (Ding et al, 2017; To and Chan, 2017; Zhang et al, 2017)
Summary
Natural enzymes are innately endowed with substrate-binding sites, which are essential for the formation of enzyme-substrate complex and crossing the activation energy barrier of catalytic reactions. These binding sites are generated by the elaborated folding of peptides into cavity-like conformations that are spatially complementary to the substrates. With the development of host-guest chemistry, cyclodextrins (Breslow, 1982), calixarenes (Li et al, 2020a; Li et al, 2020b), pillararenes (Xiao et al, 2018; Xiao et al, 2019), cucurbiturils (Wagner et al, 2020), and many other macrocyclic compounds with enzyme-like substrate affinity and selectivity, have been studied for specific molecular recognition, binding, and bioinspired catalysis.
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