Biological structures are unsurpassed with regard to the beauty of their architectures and the sophistication of their functions. During the long process of evolution Nature has learned how to construct these structures from simple building blocks like aminoacids and carbohydrates. A common feature of the technology developed by Nature is that the molecular construction process takes place stepwise, in a hierarchical fashion. Information is ‘programmed’  in the building blocks  and expressed at higher levels of organization by processes such as molecular recognition and self-assembly. The outcome of this programmed assembly, amongst others, are materials with exceptional properties and catalysts that convert molecules with very high efficiencies and selectivities.

    Unlike Nature, chemistry has a very short history of making and assembling molecules. It only began in 1826 with Woehler’s accidental synthesis of urea. Since this landmarking event which opened the field of Molecular Chemistry enormous progress has been made.  In the beginning of the last century Staudinger developed the concepts of Macromolecular Chemistry which increased the momentum further, stimulating chemists to synthesize molecules with very large dimensions, including bio-macromolecules. The advent of Supramolecular Chemistry at the end of the 1960’s took chemistry one step further.  New technologies became available to assemble molecules and macromolecules into architectures of nano-sized dimensions using non-covalent synthesis. The current challenge is to precisely control the structure, dimension, and shape of these architectures in such a way that a specific property or function can be obtained.

    In the lecture our efforts to construct large chemical assemblages by covalent and non-covalent synthesis will be discussed. Our approach, like that used by Nature, is to design and synthesize building blocks which contain the required information encoded within them for a stepwise, hierarchical assembly process. These building blocks include chiral disc-shaped molecules which yield helical supramolecular polymers by pi-pi stacking interactions and amphiphilic molecules of different sizes (see Figure 1) which form a variety of macromolecular and supramolecular  structures like fibers, tapes, helices, and braids.

References
1. J.J.L.M.Cornelissen, M.Fischer, N.A.J.M.Sommerdijk, R.J.M.Nolte, Science 280, 1427 (1998).
2. H.Engelkamp, S.Middelbeek, R.J.M.Nolte, Science 284, 785 (1999).
3. N.A.J.M.Sommerdijk, S.J.Holder, R.C.Hiorns, R.G.Jones, R.J.M.Nolte, Macromolecules 33, 8289 (2000).