We have recently developed a way to make a family of large organic cages using reversible hydrazone bond formation reactions. The synthesis of these is rapid and general (as little as two high-yielding steps from commercially-available materials), and gives water soluble cages. These cages can bind to anions, transition metals and other guests. This project will investigate coordinating transition metals and lanthanides to the cages. There are lots of cages that are assembled by metals binding to ligands, but these will be unusual because the pre-formed cage will act as the ligand. We hope that these will give interesting catalytic properties as we will be able to incorporate coordinatively unsaturated metal ions next to a well-defined 3D binding pocket. This will be studied in collaboration with the Colebatch group.