“…Interest in halogen bonds (XBs) has seen a revival in the past couple of decades, as the potential to exploit their unique properties has become better recognized (Erdé lyi, 2012;Gilday et al, 2015;Cavallo et al, 2016). XBs are widely applied to the chemical engineering of crystals and supramolecular assemblies (Metrangolo & Resnati, 2001;Metrangolo et al, 2005), including designing liquid crystals (Nguyen et al, 2004;Bruce, 2008;Chen et al, 2014;Fernandez-Palacio et al, 2016), and organometallic frameworks (Maharramov et al, 2016), stabilizing volatile liquids (Aakerö y et al, 2015), synthesizing organic catalysts (Coulembier et al, 2010;Jungbauer & Huber, 2015;Matsuzawa et al, 2016), designing anion receptors (Sarwar, Dragisic, Sagoo et al, 2010;Kilah et al, 2011;Tepper et al, 2015;Amendola et al, 2016;Wageling et al, 2016;Mullaney et al, 2016;Hoque & Das, 2016), and in host-guest assemblies (Dumele et al, 2015;Noa et al, 2015Noa et al, , 2016Gonzá lez et al, 2016;Puttreddy et al, 2016). In biology (Auffinger et al, 2004;Scholfield et al, 2013), XBs are seen to direct DNA macromolecular conformations (Voth, Hays & Ho, 2007), to increase the affinity of agonists (Rohde et al, 2012) and antagonists to protein targets (Lam et al, 2009;Lu, Shi et al, 2009;Hardegger et al, 2011;Scholfield et al, 2013;Xu et al, 2014;…”