Rational Design of a Face‐Centred Square‐Cuboid Coordination Cage

Abstract

The simple synthetic conversion of a 90°-angled bis-pyridyl ligand into a tripodal tris-pyridyl ligand leads to the formal transformation of a cubic (a=b=c) into a square-cuboid (a=b≠c) coordination cage. Mathematical considerations associated with the ligand design, together with X-ray structure results, NMR spectroscopic and mass spectrometric characterization and molecular modeling of both coordination cages are presented and discussed.