ABSTRACT
Control of self-assembly is significant to the preparation of supramolecular materials and illustration of diversities in either natural or artificial systems. Supra-amphiphiles have remarkable advantages in the construction of nanostructures but control of shape and size of supramolecular nanostructures is still a great challenge. Here, we fabricate a series of supra-amphiphiles by utilizing the recognition motifs based on a heteroditopic porphyrin amphiphile and its zinc complex. These porphyrin amphiphiles can bind with a few guests including Cl-, coronene, C60, 4,4'-bipyridine and 2,4,6-tri(pyridin-4-yl)-1,3,5-triazine, which are further applied to facilitate the controllable self-assembly. Addition of these guests result in the formation of various supra-amphiphiles with well-defined structures, thus induce the generation of different aggregates. A diverse of aggregation morphologies including nanospheres, nanorods, films, spheric micelles, vesicles and macrowires are constructed upon the influence of specific complexation, which highlights the present work with abundant control on the shapes and dimensions of self-assemblies.
ABSTRACT
The template-directed strategy is a powerful method to construct porphyrin nanorings with high complexities, wherein metalloporphyrin precursors pre-organize via supramolecular interactions of the porphyrin or its central metal with a carefully selected template, and then react with each other to deliver a final cyclic multiporphyrin structure. In this article, we review the recent breakthroughs in the template-directed synthesis methods and new structures of porphyrin or metalloporphyrin nanorings, as well as their applications in host-guest chemistry and artificial light-harvesting.
