A Chemically Powered Rotary Molecular Motor Based on Reversible Oxazepine Formation

Abstract

While biological machines are powered mainly by chemical transformations, chemically driven artificial rotary motor systems are very limited. Here, we report an aniline-phenol-based rotary molecular motor that operates via an information ratchet mechanism. The 360° directional rotation about a single covalent bond can be chemically driven by reversible oxazepine formation. Both the oxazepine formation and hydrolysis steps are kinetically gated via dynamic kinetic resolution, arising from the kinetic bias of chiral catalysts for enantiomers. Given the 95% ee (97.5:2.5) and 88% ee (94:6) of the individual gating steps of motor analogues, the overall directionality ratio could be calculated to be 91.7:8.3 (97.5% x 94% ≈ 91.7%), which means that the motor will make one mistake (backward rotation) approximately every 11 to 12 turns.