Bifunctional Metal-Organic Nanoballs Featuring Lewis Acidic and Basic Sites as a New Platform for One-Pot Tandem Catalysis

The design and synthesis of polyhedra using coordination-driven self-assembly has been an intriguing research area for synthetic chemists. Metal-organic polyhedra are a class of intricate molecular architectures that have garnered significant attention in the literature due to their diverse structures and potential applications. Hereby, we report Cu-MOP, a bifunctional metal-organic cuboctahedra built using 2,6-dimethylpyridine-3,5-dicarboxylic acid and copper acetate at room temperature. The presence of both Lewis basic pyridine groups and Lewis acidic copper sites imparts catalytic activity to Cu-MOP for the tandem one-pot deacetalization-Knoevenagel/Henry reactions. The effect of solvent system and time duration on the yields of the reactions was studied, and the results illustrate the promising potential of these metal-organic cuboctahedra, also known as nanoballs for applications in catalysis. A bifunctional metal-organic nanoball architecture was constructed using 2,6-dimethylpyridinecarboxylic acid and copper acetate at room temperature through a straightforward synthesis approach. The resultant Cu-MOP cuboctahedra combining Lewis basic pyridine and Lewis acidic Cu(II) centers demonstrated high activity and versatility for catalyzing one-pot tandem reactions, and optimal yields were obtained utilizing DMSO as the solvent system. image