Analogy powered by prediction and structural invariants: computationally-led discovery of a mesoporous hydrogen-bonded organic cage crystal

Abstract

Mesoporous molecular crystals have potential applications in separation and catalysis, but they are rare and hard to design because many weak interactions compete during crystallization, and most molecules have an energetic preference for close packing. Here, we combine crystal structure prediction (CSP) with structural invariants to continuously qualify the similarity between predicted crystal structures for related molecules. This allows isomorphous substitution strategies, which can be unreliable for molecular crystals, to be augmented by a priori prediction, thus leveraging the power of both approaches. We used this combined approach to discover a rare example of a low-density (0.54 g cm ^-3) mesoporous hydrogen-bonded framework (HOF), 3D-CageHOF-1. This structure comprises an organic cage (Cage-3-NH ₂) that was predicted to form kinetically trapped, low-density polymorphs via CSP. Pointwise distance distribution structural invariants revealed five predicted forms of Cage-3-NH ₂that are analogous to experimentally realized porous crystals of a chemically different but geometrically similar molecule, T2. More broadly, this approach overcomes the difficulties in comparing predicted molecular crystals with varying lattice parameters, thus allowing for the systematic comparison of energy-structure landscapes for chemically dissimilar molecules.

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ORCID for Graeme M. Day: orcid.org/0000-0001-8396-2771

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