Out-of-Oblivion Cage Molecules and Their Porous Crystalline Phases

An automated molecular porosity detection approach was developed and applied to PubChem, a repository of ca. 94 million molecules, to discover intrinsically porous cage molecules, which, although previously considered by chemists, have remained in oblivion to the porous solids community as neither their crystal structures nor solid-state porosity have been previously reported. The effort led to identification of six such cage molecules reported over the span of the last two decades. The following crystal structure prediction effort suggested that these molecules can form stable low-energy porous crystalline phases. One of the identified lowest energy phases exhibits zeolite-range porosity with pore diameters of ca. 8 angstrom and internal surface area of 1070 m(2)/g.