Systematic synthesis of large porous organic cages driven by steric hindrance

Large organic cages (> 3 nm) hold great promise for enhancing gas uptake capacity and encapsulating bulky guests, such as nanoparticles and biomolecules. However, their synthesis remains challenging due to entropic penalties favoring smaller cages and interlocked byproducts during self-assembly. Here, we present a steric hindrance-driven strategy to systematically construct a series of stable [6+12] cages via imine condensation between tetratopic and ditopic synthons. Introducing bulky substituents to the tetratopic building blocks effectively suppressed entropic competition, directing assembly exclusively toward Tet6Di12 topologies. Notably, enhanced steric crowding induced an unprecedented triangular orthobicupola geometry (Johnson polyhedron J27)—the first report of this topology in organic cages. Molecular dynamics and density functional theory calculations confirmed that the increased steric bulk thermodynamically favors Tet6Di12 over smaller analogs (Tet3Di6 and Tet4Di8). Single-crystal structures revealed that the large-sized cages self-assemble into unique spatial arrangements of alternating ultramicro-mesoporous three-dimensional pore networks, with intrinsic frustration in close packing conferring permanent porosity.