Kim E. Jelfs

Apr 25, 2024 | nature.com | Qiang Zhu |Hang Qu |Graeme M. Day |Kim E. Jelfs |Marc A. Little

AbstractHere we report a two-step, hierarchical synthesis that assembles a trigonal prismatic organic cage into a more symmetric, higher-order tetrahedral cage, or ‘cage of cages’. Both the preformed [2+3] trigonal prismatic cage building blocks and the resultant tetrahedral [4[2+3]+6]cage molecule are constructed using ether bridges. This strategy affords the [4[2+3]+6]cage molecule excellent hydrolytic stability that is not a feature of more common dynamic cage linkers, such as imines.

Mar 7, 2024 | nature.com | Kim E. Jelfs

Determining what guest can effectively bind in a host, or the reverse, is a central challenge in chemistry. To address this, an electron-density-based transformer method of generating and optimizing host–guest binders is proposed, applied to two different host systems and validated by experiment.

Oct 16, 2023 | nature.com | Ronita Mathias |Guanghui Zhu |Yun-Ho Ahn |Scott G. Hoy |Andrew Tarzia |Kim E. Jelfs | +1 more

AbstractThe thermal distillation of crude oil mixtures is an energy-intensive process, accounting for nearly 1% of global energy consumption. Membrane-based separations are an appealing alternative or tandem process to distillation due to intrinsic energy efficiency advantages. We developed a family of spirocyclic polytriazoles from structurally diverse monomers for membrane applications.