Organic synthesis sophisticated tools

This chapter illustrates how templates have been used to aid organic synthesis and attempts to refine and expand the definition of a molecular template. The later chapters in this book demonstrate that templates are emerging as powerful tools in many areas of molecular construction. We have highlighted the key parameters required to evaluate template effects quantitatively. We hope this will encourage pioneers in the field to calibrate new systems, so that we can gauge their progress as they escalate to higher levels of efficiency and sophistication. 

The modern tools available in synthetic chemistry, either from the organic viewpoint or concerning the preparation of transition metal complexes, allow one to prepare more and more sophisticated molecular systems. In parallel, time-resolved photochemistry and photophysics are nowadays particularly efficient to disentangle complex photochemical processes taking place on multicomponent molecules. In the present chapter, we have shown that the combination of the two types of expertise, namely synthesis and photochemistry, permits to tackle ambitious problems related to artificial photosynthesis or controlled dynamic systems. Although the two families of compounds made and studied lead to completely different properties and, potentially, to applications in very remote directions, the structural analogy of the complexes used is striking. 

Over these past 150 years, natural and synthetic materials use became much more founded on knowledge of the underlying physical principles. The evermore sophisticated analytical tools that could probe the molecular world provided insight into the hierarchies of organization from the atoms and molecules up to the macroscopic scale of materials. It became clear that there is more to materials than just innovative molecular synthesis. 

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