Transmetalation and Demetallization for Open-Oyster-like Non-Ionic Cd(II) Macrocycles

This work designed a nonionic extended dialdehyde 6,6′-(phenylazanediyl)dipicolinaldehyde (PDPA) for constructing Schiff-base macrocyclic complexes with weaker metal–ligand interactions, so as to solve the long-standing challenges of transmetalation and demetallization in macrocyclic complexes. An enantiomeric pair of open-oyster-like 26-membered [2 + 2] Schiff-base macrocyclic dinuclear Cd(II) complexes (S,S-1a, R,R-1b) could be obtained, having S,S/R,R-1,2-diaminocyclohexane (S,S/R,R-DACH) precursors, while Cu(II) ion template only resulted in a mononuclear Schiff-base Cu(II) acyclic complex (S,S-2) accompanied by the half-oxidation of PDPA instead of expected [2 + 2] Cu(II) macrocyclic complexes. It is suggested that the weak oxidization capability of Cu(II) ion is responsible for the formation of S,S-2 because X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) for the solid powder of reaction mixture of direct Cu(II) ion template synthesis implies that both Cu(I) and Cu(II) species are present. In fact, corresponding [2 + 2] dinuclear Cu(II) macrocycles and even metal-free macrocycles unsuitable for direct synthesis can be obtained via Cd(II) → Cu(II) transmetalation and Na2S demetalation verified by ESI-MS and UV–vis spectra. In addition, control experiments indicate that the synthesis of metal-free macrocycles via the direct nontemplate method merely results in the mixture of multiple components of [1 + 1], [2 + 2], and [3 + 3] Schiff-base macrocycles, and they are difficult to isolate.