Assembly of a Porous Supramolecular Polyknot from Rigid Trigonal Prismatic Building Blocks

Herein
we report a hydrogen-bonded three-dimensional porous supramolecular
polyknot assembled from a rigid trigonal prismatic triptycene building
block with six extended peripheral aryl-carboxyl groups. Within this
superstructure, three arrays of undulated 2D rhombic subnets, which
display an inclined polycatenation, are interconnected to give an
unprecedented uninodal six-connected net with a point symbol of (3.44.610). Such an entanglement results in a trefoil
knot motif, which, as the basic repeating unit, is fused and interlocked
with itself three-dimensionally to afford a supramolecular polyknot.
This example highlights the ability of supramolecular systems to form
topologically complex architectures using geometrically simple building
blocks.