Supramolecular buckets

Of the diverse supramolecule architectures considered for chemosensor design, we emphasize one—a miniature bucket. Supramolecular buckets maintain a cylindrical cavity with structurally and chemically well-defined upper and lower rims. By virtue of its molecular shape, the bucket is an intrinsic receptor site. A supramolecular bucket alone, however, is an inadequate chemosensor because a signal cannot be produced. In the simplest chemosensing constructs, the analyte generates a signal upon association with the bucket whereas in more elaborate designs, functionality at the rim of the bucket offers sites to attach a discrete reporter site. The thematic focus of this chapter is bucket chemosensors that operate by the 3R scheme shown in Fig. 2, namely, a measurable change in a... 

A guest in a supramolecular bucket may participate in electron transfer with substituents at the rim of the bucket. Weidner and Pikramenou have studied di-... 

A bucket-shaped cavity provides the consummate supramolecular architecture for analyte recognition. The most prominent buckets used in chemosensor design... 

The simplest type of supramolecular structure (and that which is the sole focus of this chapter) is a host-guest inclusion complex, in which a small guest molecule becomes included within the hollow internal cavity of a larger, cagelike host molecule in solution. This is illustrated in Fig. 1 for naphthalene as a guest becoming included in the cavity of a cyclodextrin (represented as a molecular bucket , as will be described in Section 1.2). 

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