Extremely Slow Dynamics of an Abiotic Helical Assembly: Unusual Relevance to the Secondary Structure of Proteins

Serendipitously, we found that isoleucine methylester functionalized perylenediimide <b>1</b> undergoes an extremely slow supramolecular helical assembly over a day’s time. Surprisingly, heating led to irreversible chiral denaturation. However, reversible helical assembly could be achieved only in the presence of nondenatured aggregates of <b>1</b>, which act as seeds. The intriguing functional relevance deduced from <b>1</b> was employed to draw parallels with the secondary structure of proteins, envisaging its plausible implications

Molecular Architectonics of Naphthalenediimides for Efficient Structure–Property Correlation

We present a bioinspired design strategy to effectively tailor the assembly of naphthalenediimides (NDIs) into a wide variety of architectures by functionalizing with amino acid derivatives. This bioinspired process of custom designing and engineering molecular assemblies is termed “bioinspired architectonics”. By employing minute structural mutations in the form of α-substituents of amino acids, we successfully engineered molecular assembly of NDIs into zero-dimensional (0D, spheres), one-dimensional (1D, fibers), and two-dimensional (2D, sheets) architectures. The 2D sheets of phenylalanine methylester appended NDI <b>1</b> showed remarkable bulk electron mobility of up to 1 cm² V^–1s^–1. With the aid of photophysical, diffraction, and microscopy techniques we rationalize the effect of molecular structure with their ordering and electronic properties in an effort to find structure–property correlations via a bioinspired modular approach