Recently, Prof. Xing Pengyao from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of SDU made an important progress regarding the control over self-assembled chiral nanostructures from organic amphiphiles, which has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society with the title of“Occurrence of Chiral Nanostructures Induced by Multiple Hydrogen Bonds” [J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2019, 141, 25, 9946-9954].

Developing artificial systems to mimic the emergence of chirality is of vital importance in better understanding the mysterious origin of natural homochirality and guiding the design of advanced chiroptical materials. They present a DNA-inspired control over the emergence of supramolecular nanoscale chirality in multiple hydrogenbonded self-assemblies (See Fig. 1). N-Terminated aromatic amino acids bearing serine and aromatic domains could self-assemble into lamellar microsheets without nanoscale chirality, ascribed to their pronounced molecular stacking preference on two-dimensional orientations. Significantly, when achiral bipyridine-, melamine-, and imidazole-based molecular binders that could potentially form hydrogen-bonded complexes with these aromatic amino acids were introduced, the induced chiral nanostructures from the resulting coassemblies were observed. Melamine and its derivatives presented an excellent capability to generate ordered supramolecular structures and induce the nanoscale chirality. Assisted by the key duplex hydrogen bonds between the melamine core and serine segments, chiral nanotubes and ribbons were obtained. This study reveals that multiple hydrogen bonds are the prerequisite for inducing the emergence of chiral nanostructures from integrated coassemblies.

Figure 1

This paper is a cooperated work done by Prof. Xing and Prof. Zhao Yanli from Nanyang Technological University at Singapore, of which first affiliation address is School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Shandong University and Prof. Xing as the first author. It is also supported by the Qilu Young Scholar Funding of SDU.

Author: Xing Pengyao

Edited by: Che Huiqing