Bioinspired supramolecular liquid crystals.

Abstract

A brief account on the historical events leading to the discovery of self-assembling dendrons that generate self-organizable supramolecular dendrimers, or supramolecular polymers, and self-organizable dendronized polymers is provided. These building blocks were accessed by an accelerated design strategy that involves structural and retrostructural analysis of periodic and quasi-periodic assemblies. This design strategy mediated the discovery of porous helical supramolecular structures that self-assembled from dendritic dipeptides. Helical porous columns are the closest mimics of biologically related structures, such as tobacco mosaic virus coat, porous transmembrane proteins, porous pathogens and antibiotics. It is expected that this concept will allow one to investigate the structural origin of functions in synthetic supramolecular materials.