Hierarchically Porous Organic Cages

Imparting mesopores to organic cages of an intrinsic microporous nature to build up hierarchically porous cage soft materials is a grand challenge and will reshape the property and application scope of traditional organic cage molecules. Herein, we discovered how to engineer mesopores into microporous organic cages via their host-guest interactions with long chain ionic surfactants. Equally important, the ionic head of surfactants equips the supramolecularly assembled porous structures with charge-selective uptake and release function in solution. Interestingly, such hierarchically porous organic cage can serve as a nanoreactor once trapping enzymes within the cavity, which show 5-fold enhanced activity of enzymatic catalysis when compared with the free enzymes.

Automated summary

The researchers successfully engineered mesopores into microporous organic cages through host-guest interactions with long chain ionic surfactants, equipping the resulting hierarchically porous cage soft materials with charge-selective uptake and release abilities in solution. Interestingly, trapping enzymes within the cage turns it into a nanoreactor, leading to a 5-fold enhancement in enzymatic catalysis activity compared to free enzymes.