Publications by authors named "Holden W H Lai"

Membranes have the potential to substantially reduce energy consumption of industrial chemical separations, but their implementation has been limited owing to a performance upper bound-the trade-off between permeability and selectivity. Although recent developments of highly permeable polymer membranes have advanced the upper bounds for various gas pairs, these polymers typically exhibit limited selectivity. We report a class of hydrocarbon ladder polymers that can achieve both high selectivity and high permeability in membrane separations for many industrially relevant gas mixtures.

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We report the facile synthesis and study of two soluble microporous ladder polymers, CANAL-TBs, by combining catalytic arene-norbornene annulation (CANAL) and Tröger's base (TB) formation. The polymers were synthesized in two steps from commercially available chemicals in high yields. CANAL-TBs easily formed mechanically robust films, were thermally stable up to 440 °C, and exhibited very high Brunauer-Teller-Emmett surface areas of 900-1000 m g.

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Although antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) find increasing applications in cancer treatment, or treatment-emergent resistance mechanisms may impair clinical benefit. Two resistance mechanisms that emerge under prolonged exposure include upregulation of transporter proteins that confer multidrug resistance (MDR) and loss of cognate antigen expression. New technologies that circumvent these resistance mechanisms may serve to extend the utility of next-generation ADCs.

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Rigid ladder polymers represent a unique polymer architecture but have limited synthetic accessibility and structural diversity. Using catalytic arene-norbornene annulation (CANAL) polymerization, we synthesized ladder polymers consisting of rigid and kinked norbornyl benzocyclobutene backbones and bearing various functional groups, such as alcohol, amine, ester, carbamate, amide, benzyl bromide, azide, and heterocycles. The incorporation of functional groups was achieved by either copolymerization of functionalized ladder-type dinorbornenes or postpolymerization functionalization.

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Ladder polymers are unique in that their backbones consist of fused rings with adjacent rings having two or more atoms in common. The restriction of bond rotations in rigid ladder polymers greatly limits their conformational freedom, leading to many intriguing and unique properties. As a non-traditional type of polymers, rigid ladder polymers are of great fundamental interest and technical importance as advanced materials for applications such as membrane gas separation and organic electronics.

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1,3,5-Tris(4-carboxyphenyl)benzene assembles into an intricate 8-fold polycatenated assembly of (6,3) hexagonal nets formed through hydrogen bonds and π-stacking. One polymorph features 56 independent molecules in the asymmetric unit, the largest Z' reported to date. The framework is permanently porous, with a BET surface area of 1095 m(2) g(-1) and readily adsorbs N2, H2 and CO2.

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The fraction of gauche conformers of N,N-dimethylsuccinamic acid (1) and its Li(+), Na(+), K(+), Mg(2+), Ca(2+), and N(Bu)4(+) salts were estimated in DMSO and D2O solution by comparing the experimental vicinal proton-proton couplings determined by (1)H NMR spectroscopy with those calculated using the Haasnoot, de Leeuw, and Altona (HLA) equation. In DMSO, the gauche preferences were found to increase with decreasing Ahrens ionic radius of the metal counterion. The same trend was not seen in D2O, where the gauche fraction for all of the metallic salts were estimated to be approximately statistical or less.

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