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“Pyrene-box” cages easily crystallize from aqueous solutions and readily encapsulate compounds of biological interest. These host–guest systems can be obtained under ambient conditions from 1,3,5,8-pyrenetetrasulfonate (PTS), guanidinium derivatives (G+) and biogenic guests bearing cationic groups. Out of the many examples of synthetic molecular capsules, Pyrene box cages are completely responding to the requirements of green chemistry: non-toxic, water soluble, cheap, commercially available compounds. The “Pyrene-Box” cages have been used for the in situ encapsulation of unstable or non-crystalline biogenic compounds, allowing the complete molecular structure determination of species that do not crystallize by themselves. The encapsulated guests have a reduced motional degrees of freedom which is obtained via their anchoring to the Pyrene box cages that allows at the same time to reduce a significant amount of disorder. In this highlight we discuss the recent developments of the encapsulation chemistry of the “Pyrene box” and the strategy behind its synthesis, together with further possible developments and the limitations of this biomimetic supramolecular cage system. The “Pyrene Box” shows great potential for future applications, ranging from fundamental studies of structure determination of unstable molecules to drug delivery vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By anchoring lanthanide coordination monomers onto a PMMA polymer backbone via a pre-designed vinylbenzyl-substituted NTB-type ligand, we succeeded in the fabrication of homo or hetero Ln-metallopolymers that can emit tunable and designable multicoloured photoluminescence as well as white light emission. Copolymerization results in the fine-tuning of the energy state of the ligand in the metallopolymer compared with that in the coordination monomer, thereby changing the energy transfer efficiency to Eu3+ and Tb3+ centers in opposite ways. And further designing of hetero-lanthanide metallopolymers leads to additional energy transfer between Eu3+ and Tb3+, facilitating the generation of pure white light emission. In general, the facile and controllable synthesis procedure, versatile and reproducible combination of lanthanides, ligands and polymer backbones, and relatively high white light emitting luminous efficiency (＞5%) prove this method to be promising in future lighting WPLED applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work shows that encapsulation can be used to promote amide bond formation in water under mild conditions, in the absence of carbodiimide coupling agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A facile lipase activation has been achieved by direct addition of multivalent amide dynameric frameworks into the reaction aqueous solutions, through the combined effects of lipase–host matrices, H-bonds and interfacial interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]