Trapping in situ scission products of C–O ester bonds by unique coordination supramolecular architectures

Various decomposition products of C–O ether bond cleavage have been trapped in supramolecular architectures as templates based on hydrothermal reaction of three-component metal–carboxylate–phen, which not only results in the formation of [5]pseudorotaxane structure, 3D porous framework and supramolecular structure, but also provides directly crystallographic evidence to explain how the C–O ether bond breaks during decomposition.