Fuel-Driven Dissipative Self-Assembly of a Supra-Amphiphile in Batch Reactor

Dissipative self-assembly is an intriguing but challenging research topic in chemistry, materials science, physics, and biology because most functional self-assembly in nature, such as the organization and operation of cells, is actually an out-of-equilibrium system driven by energy dissipation. In this article, we successfully fabricated an I₂-responsive supra-amphiphile by a PEGylated poly­(amino acid) and realize its dissipative self-assembly in batch reactor by coupling it with the redox reaction between NaIO₃ and thiourea, in which I₂ is an intermediate product. The formation and dissipative self-assembly of the supra-amphiphile can be repeatedly initiated by adding the mixture of NaIO₃ and thiourea, which herein acts as “chemical fuel”, while the lifetime of the transient nanostructures formed by the dissipative self-assembly is easily tuned by altering thiourea concentration in the “chemical fuel”. Furthermore, as an application demo, the dissipative self-assembly of the supra-amphiphile is examined to control dispersion of multiwalled carbon nanotubes in water, exhibiting a good performance of organic pollutant removal

Neutral cholic acid–coumarin conjugate exhibit excellent anion binding properties by cooperative aryl CH and amide NH segments

<p>A neutral cholic acid–coumarin conjugate was developed for anion recognition. It is revealed by the experimental and theoretical results that the coumarin group can provide CH segments as hydrogen bond donors by cooperation with the adjoining amide NH segments. With excellent biocompatibility, this receptor with coumarin as fluorescence sensors also have the potential to be used as an efficient and non-destructive probe for anion detection in living cells. This work displays a new insight into the importance of coumarin group as anion recognition group, which is not well presented so far.</p