Tag Archives: pentafoil knot

Knotty molecules

I couldn’t resist the wordplay (knotty/naughty) when I saw the Nov. 7, 2011 news item on Nanowerk titled, Tying molecules in knots. From the news item,

A research team headed by Professor David Leigh of the University of Edinburgh (UK) and Academy Professor Kari Rissanen of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) have made the most complex molecular knot to date, as reported in Nature Chemistry (“A synthetic molecular pentafoil knot”).

However, deliberately tying molecules into well-defined knots so that these effects can be studied is extremely difficult. Up to now, only the simplest type of knot – a trefoil knot – had been prepared by scientists. Now Professor David Leigh’s team (www.catenane.net) at the University of Edinburgh together with Academy Professor Kari Rissanen at the University of Jyväskylä have succeeded in preparing and characterizing a more complex type of knot – a pentafoil knot (also known as a cinquefoil knot or a Solomon’s seal knot) – a knot which looks like a five-pointed star.

Remarkably, the thread that is tied into the star-shaped knot is just 160 atoms in length – that is about 16 nanometers long (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter).

Will this repopularize macramé (making textile by knotting the fibres)?

Cavandoli Macramé_Keith Russell

I found the image in Macramé essay on Wikipedia and Cavandoli is a form of Italian macramé.