Zinc(II)-porphyrin receptors in multi-point molecular recognition: Recent progress

The tremendous efforts made in order to control the coordination chemistry of hemoprotein models have considerably enhanced the synthesis of functiona lized porphyrins, whose carefully designed architectures allowed for select ive bindings of exogenic substrates. The common use of zinc(II) in place of pentacoordinated iron(II) has induced the use of zinc(II) porphyrins as bu ilding blocks for selective receptors. These receptors offer a convenient c ombination of multi-point recognition of substrates, and monitoring of the complexation due to the chromophoric nature of the tetrapyrrolic unit. This review is dedicated to recent progress made in the field of molecular reco gnition involving multi-point selective binding processes, in which the est ablishment of a strong coordination bond is finely tuned by one or more wea k interactions adequately introduced in the architecture of a functionalize d zinc(II)-porphyrin.