With the aim of investigating the structural effects, such as the relative position and distance of donor and acceptor fluorophores, on FRET, the short donor ligand
14 and coumarin
endo-functionalized ligand
15 were designed and prepared. Correspondingly, metallacycles
17 and
18 were constructed through selfassembly of donor ligands
14 and
15 with acceptor ligand
12, respectively. As expected, energy transfer efficiency (
ΦET) between coumarin and rhodamine in metallacycles
16,
17 and
18 was calculated to be 49.18%, 73.52% and 56.74%, respectively. Moreover, the rate constant for self-assembly of metallacycles
16,
17 and
18 was determined to be 1.09 × 10
–3, 5.67 × 10
–4 and 7.80 × 10
–4, respectively. Furthermore, the dynamic ligand exchange between metallasupramolecular architectures, the anion-induced disassembly and reassembly of metallacycles, and the stability of metallasupramolecular structures in different solvents were comprehensively investigated by FRET. For instance, the gradual addition of 6.0 equiv. of Br
- into the solution of metallacycle
16 caused a remarkable decrease in emission related to rhodamine accompanied by an increase in emission corresponding to coumarin (
Fig. 4), which indicated the disassembly of metallacycle
16 with the addition of Br
- due to the stronger nucleophilicity of Br
- to the platinum atom than that of pyridine unit. On the contrary, the addition of 6.0 equiv. of Ag
+ into the halogenated solution of metallacycle
16 induced the reassembly of
16 as evidenced by the reoccurrence of the FRET process. Moreover, realtime monitoring of the FRET signals of metallacycle
16 in different solvents such as dichloromethane, acetone, and acetonitrile showed that metallacycle
16 displayed good stability in dichloromethane and acetone while instability in acetonitrile since acetonitrile featured the stronger binding ability to platinum atoms than pyridine. Therefore, this study presented the first successful example on real-time monitoring the process and dynamics of coordination-driven self-assembly through the FRET technique, which undoubtedly deepened the understanding of the coordination-driven self-assembly process and mechanism.