It is a huge challenge
to achieve giant optical anisotropy (e.g., birefringence) over a wide
region from infrared (IR) to ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy. This is
mainly due to the lack of ideal optical motifs, which should have
giant structural anisotropy with a wide transparent range. Especially
in the field of nonlinear optical (NLO) materials, polar motifs with
giant optical anisotropy are extremely scarce, but they are favorable
to exhibit strong second harmonic generation (SHG) effect and phase-matching
capacity. On the basis of analysis of microstructure and macro optical
property, in this study, we focus on one-dimensional chained cyano
(CN) motif and surprisingly find that it can exhibit sufficiently
large optical anisotropy and SHG effect from IR to UV regions. Therefore,
it is reasonable to believe that the CN motif can be considered as
a novel NLO material gene, which was totally ignored in the previous
studies. Interestingly, the CN-gene can be integrated into various
coordination structures, such as metal cyanides, cyanogen halides,
and cyanogen chalcogenides, to promote these materials to exhibit
tunable NLO capabilities from IR to UV and deep-UV regions. Remarkably,
the chained acentric CNI structure, which has already been obtained
in the experiment, can achieve the IR and UV frequency conversion
with a sufficiently large SHG effect (∼17 pm/V) and a giant
optical birefringence (∼0.7 at 1064 nm). Therefore, the cyano-based
compounds proposed in this article can not only enrich the structural
chemistry of NLO materials, but also potentially advance the development
of optical material genome project.