We report a metal-organic design that allows decoration and cross-linking of metal centres through halogen-bond-directed co-crystallisation. Halogen bonds have emerged as reliable and directional interactions, alternative to hydrogen bonds, in supramolecular engineering of organic solids. [1] Halogen bonds that form between a polarisable and electron-deficient halogen atom (the halogen-bond donor) and an electron-rich Lewis base (the halogen-bond acceptor) [2] have been utilised to construct co-crystals, [3] salts, [4] ionic inclusion frameworks [5] and liquid crystals. [6] An attractive target in halogen-bond-based materials engineering is the inclusion of transition metals, which are expected to introduce interesting magnetic, electrical and optical properties. So far, formation of halogen-bonded co-crystals with metal-organic species has proven difficult. [7,8] Although the self-assembly of metal-organic molecules with self-complementary halogen-bonding functionalities was demonstrated, [9] attempts to construct multicomponent molecular materials have not been successful.[10] This difficulty was explained by competition with other non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonds [11] and halogen-halogen interactions. In our search for a suitable strategy to decorate metal-organic complexes using halogen bonds we sought to achieve the highest possible generality. Thus, we were interested in a modular [12] approach that would allow adding different halogen-bonding functionalities onto a given metal-organic fragment. We recognised planar complexes of divalent metals with dibenzoylmethanate anions (dbm À ) as suitable candidates. In particular, nickel(II) and cobalt(II) dibenzoylA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G meth-
A C H T U N G T R E N N U N G anates ([NiA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G (dbm) 2 ] and [CoA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G (dbm)2], Scheme 1 a) provide a coordinatively unsaturated and equatorially protected platform onto which a molecule with a halogen-bonding functionality could be attached. We targeted the ditopic molecules morpholine (mor) and thiomorpholine (tmo) as suitable ligands [13] that would attach through Co À N (or Ni À N) bonds to form coordinatively saturated complexes: