Quick post on cool idea from people we like

What? Someone who isn't Excimer is posting? Every now and then I have to take a break from staring at equations or my eyes will cross. Spring break isn't far off, though, so if Excimer is lucky, I will pick up the slack then.[1]

Confession: Both of us behind CBC have a raging chemical celebrity crush on Bob Grubbs and Sir Fraser Stoddart.[2] With that in mind, I've been meaning to mention this, but it got buried on the flash drive...better late than never, right?

In short, the gray three-armed piece is the template, and the ring-looking piece is a crown ether with two little arms terminated by alkenes. The crown ether threads itself onto the template, then ADMET occurs to assemble the trimer. In the absence of the template, there is no trimer, although a bit of dimer is formed.

Granted, this definitely isn't the beginning of such work. There are more papers out there than I want to link to, but here is something along the same lines from Org Lett in 2006.

[1] An upcoming exam has me confronting the irony inherent in being Ψ*Ψ. If it didn't sound so cool, growing p-chem antipathy would force me to change it.
[2] Especially since the latter was knighted. You have to admit that's pretty cool.