Post-synthetic tuning of metal coordination on entangled scaffolds

Entangled structures have fascinated scientists for both their artistic beauty and functional properties. Zhang and co-workers have recently reported, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the synthesis of a cinquefoil knot in which metal coordination sites can be tuned using post-synthetic protocols, providing a way to edit the skeletons of topological molecules in order to endow them with otherwise inaccessible functions.