Template-mediated synthesis of metal-complexing polymers for molecular recognition

Abstract

The design of synthetic molecules capable of recognizing given chemical entities in a specific and predictable manner is of great fundamental and practical importance. The principal paradigm of the molecular design of such materials involves the preorganization of binding sites of the host system (receptor) around complementary binding sites of the guest molecule (substrate). Wulff and co-workers devised a novel approach to synthesizing substrate-selective polymers that consists of covalent linking of polymerizable groups around a template molecule and subsequent cross-linking polymerization of the resulting assembly. The orientations of the binding sites of the template molecules sculpt the substrate-selective architecture of the templated polymers. Here we report a novel variation of this template polymerization technique to synthesize rigid macroporous polymers containing strategically distributed Cu(II)-iminodiacetate (Cu^(II)IDA) complexes. The resulting polymers exhibit selectivity for bisimidazole "protein analogues" that are not distinguishable by reverse-phase HPLC.