Diversity of metal-organic macrocycles assembled from carbazole based ligands with different lengths.

A series of carbazole based ligands with different lengths were assembled with nickel ions to construct metal-organic macrocycles. High-resolution mass spectrometry and ion mobility-mass spectrometry have been used to analyse the resulting MnLn assembly coexisting in solution. Combining with the structural analysis of their solid confirmation, it was revealed that the diversity of the metal-organic macrocycles was increased with the flexibility of the ligands.