CO2 binding by dynamic combinatorial chemistry: an environmental selection.

We now report that a dynamic combinatorial selection approach can quantitatively provide, from trivial building blocks, an architecturally complex organic material, in which carbon dioxide is reversibly but covalently incorporated as a guest with a mass content of 20%. Solid-state analyses combined with covalent disconnection and quantization of the liberated components allowed identification of a three-component monomeric unit repeated within a range of assembled oligomeric adducts whose repartition and binding capacity can be finely tuned through the starting stoichiometries. The self-assembly of these architectures occurs through the simultaneous creation of more than 25 covalent bonds per molecular entity.