Pnictogen‐Assisted Self‐Assembly as a Means to Study Mediated Thiol/Disulfide Exchange in Supramolecular Dynamic Covalent Assemblies

Abstract

Thiol‐disulfide interchange has been an active field of study for biochemists and physical organic chemists alike due to its prevalence within biological systems and fundamentally interesting dynamic nature. More recently, efforts have been made to harness the power of this reversible reaction to make self‐assembling systems of macrocyclic and cage‐like molecules. However, less effort has focused on the fundamental study of isolating these assemblies and analyzing the factors that control the assembly and sorting of these emerging cyclic systems. We have shown previously that pnictogen‐assisted self‐assembly enables formation of discrete disulfide macrocycles and cages without competition from polymer formation for a wide variety of alkyl thiols. Herein we report the expansion of these methods to form disulfide macrocycles from aryl thiol containing ligands, allowing access to previously unreported molecules. More importantly, the development of this new self‐assembly chemistry allows for a comparison of aryl vs alkyl disulfide exchange and self‐assembly. These studies complement classical physical organic and chemical biology studies on the kinetics and thermodynamics of aryl thiol oxidation to disulfides, and we show that this self‐assembly method revises some prevailing wisdom from these key classical studies by providing new product distributions and new isolable products in cyclic disulfide formation.