Arylene-ethynylene macrocycles: Privileged shape-persistent building blocks for organic materials

This report details the advances in synthetic strategies toward arylene-ethynylene macrocycles (AEMs). After a brief description of traditional methods, we summarize recent advances based on dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC) whereby a highly active and functional group tolerant alkyne metathesis catalyst yields scalable quantities of AEMs under thermodynamic controlled reaction conditions.