Issue 45, 2018

An evolutionary algorithm for the discovery of porous organic cages

Abstract

The chemical and structural space of possible molecular materials is enormous, as they can, in principle, be built from any combination of organic building blocks. Here we have developed an evolutionary algorithm (EA) that can assist in the efficient exploration of chemical space for molecular materials, helping to guide synthesis to materials with promising applications. We demonstrate the utility of our EA to porous organic cages, predicting both promising targets and identifying the chemical features that emerge as important for a cage to be shape persistent or to adopt a particular cavity size. We identify that shape persistent cages require a low percentage of rotatable bonds in their precursors (<20%) and that the higher topicity building block in particular should use double bonds for rigidity. We can use the EA to explore what size ranges for precursors are required for achieving a given pore size in a cage and show that 16 Å pores, which are absent in the literature, should be synthetically achievable. Our EA implementation is adaptable and easily extendable, not only to target specific properties of porous organic cages, such as optimal encapsulants or molecular separation materials, but also to any easily calculable property of other molecular materials.

Graphical abstract: An evolutionary algorithm for the discovery of porous organic cages

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
10 aug 2018
Accepted
11 sep 2018
First published
11 sep 2018
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2018,9, 8513-8527

An evolutionary algorithm for the discovery of porous organic cages

E. Berardo, L. Turcani, M. Miklitz and K. E. Jelfs, Chem. Sci., 2018, 9, 8513 DOI: 10.1039/C8SC03560A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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