In order to bind a given guest, a receptor must be complementary -it must have recognition groups which are of the appropriate electronic character to complement the binding sites of the guest. Those recognition groups must be positioned on the receptor in a way that they can interact with recognition groups from the guest when both receptor and guest are in the binding conformation. Upon binding, the receptor and guest reorganize their interactions with solvent molecules (disrupting some and probably creating new ones), and change their conformation to achieve a suitable binding conformation. In the process, noncovalent interactions within each molecule may be broken or formed.The requirement to balance all the variables involved in this recognition process makes the design of successful synthetic receptors a signifi cant challenge.A frequently explored shortcut that facilitates receptor design is to incorporate rigidity in order to avoid as much as possible changes in conformation that are diffi cult to predict. In addition, a rigid preorganized receptor will decrease the cost of unfavorable reorganization energy. However, high -affi nity perfectly rigid receptors are not easy to achieve in practice since minor errors in design that demand readjustment from the receptor can be energetically very expensive [1] . Indeed, nature does not use rigidity to improve affi nity, but it still produces receptors with affi nities that are on average much better than the best synthetic receptors prepared to date. A recent survey of the binding effi ciency of synthetic and biological hosts by Houk et al. indicates that synthetic systems are typically several orders of magnitude less effi cient in binding small molecules than their biological counterparts [2] .Guest binding by natural receptors such as proteins is reinforced by intrareceptor interactions, which require conformational rearrangements of parts of the receptor that are very similar to the conformational rearrangement necessary to interact with the guest. Consequently the interactions that contribute to guest binding extend beyond the immediate binding site well into the protein structure [3] . Synthetic receptors that operate by the same principle will need to be able to Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry. Edited by Joost N. H. Reek and Sijbren Otto