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Imagine a knot so small that it can’t be seen with the naked eye. Then think even smaller.
Chemists have tied together just 54 atoms to form the smallest molecular knot yet. Described January 2 in Nature Communications, the knot is a chain of gold, phosphorus, oxygen and carbon atoms that crosses itself three times, forming a pretzel shape called a trefoil. The previous smallest molecular knot, reported in 2020, contained 69 atoms.
Chemist Richard Puddephatt, working with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Dalian, created the new knot by accident while attempting to build complex structures of interlocked ring molecules, or catenanes. Someday catenanes could be used in molecular machines — essentially, switches and motors at the molecular scale — but for now scientists are still figuring out how they work, which, in this case, resulted in producing something else by mistake.
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