Design, Synthesis and Characterization of Self-Assembling Nanotubes and Nanospheres

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The goal of the program is to obtain several new organic clusters having controlled shapes, tubes and spheres, through predicted self-assembly. The tubular and spherical clusters that we are targeting are held together by means of weak interactions: H-bonds and van der Walls contacts.****** Most sub-units leading to tubes have C3, Ci and S2 symmetry and are either cyclic peptides made from unusual amino-acids or polyamides of cis geometry. The cyclic peptides sub-units can stack on top of each other to generate wires or tubes having either very strong dipoles like alpha helices or no dipole at all. *** The other type of sub-units having disk shapes can either form sheets like graphite or balls of T, O or I symmetry, like buckminsterfullerene, that could encapsulate metals and other molecular objects. ***Supermolecules of these types could have direct applications in many areas of research and technology such as biological transport, drug delivery, sensing, non-linear optics, conductivity, photonics, gels and other new materials, catalysis****** The program is based on an iterative process involving all the following steps to finally get a complete structure properties relationship chart:***Step 1) The sub-units will be carefully designed and their self-assembly will be studied by molecular modelling. ***Step 2) The synthesis of the sub-units will be carried out in the laboratory.***Step 3) Their self-assembly and the properties of the supramolecular architectures will be studied with several modern techniques, like NMR, MS, SEM, TEM, crystallography, etc.***Step 4) Analysis of the results will either lead to useful supramolecules (that can be published and/or find applications) or necessitate a fine tuning, in which case the process will be restarted (step 1) with accumulated knowledge.