Self-Assembly of Porphyrin-Based Metallacages into Octahedra.

Despite rapid progress in recent years, it has remained challenging to prepare well-defined metal-organic complex-based suprastructures. As a result, the physicochemical mechanisms leading to their geometrical complexity remain perplexing. Here, a porphyrin-based metallacage was used as a building block to construct octahedra via self-assembly, and the mechanism for the evolution of the metallacages into octahedra was disclosed by both experiments and theoretical simulations.