Design of and Stability Studies on Trefoil Knots Featuring RhCp* Building Blocks

Four flexible ligands with different lengths, degrees of flexibility, and steric bulk were synthesized and used to prepare metal-directed assemblies. Interestingly, minor differences among the ligands led to products with dramatically different topologies: a binuclear D-shaped macrocycle, tetranuclear rectangles, and hexanuclear trefoil knots. The interconversion of the trefoil-shaped complexes was also investigated. This contribution introduces a rare ligand-controlled trefoil-rectangle shape transformation in solution.