Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

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 C 3 , C i and S 2 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.