Discrete and Well-Defined Hydrophobic Phases Confined in Self-Assembled Spherical Complexes

✍ Scribed by Kosuke Suzuki; Junya Iida; Sota Sato; Masaki Kawano; Makoto Fujita

• Book ID: 102722957
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 525 KB
• Volume: 120
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-8249
• DOI: 10.1002/ange.200801700

✦ Synopsis

Long alkyl chains have a tendency to spontaneously aggregate and form localized hydrophobic environments in polar media. [1] This tendency has been exploited to prepare a variety of micelles, [2] vesicles, [3] tubes, [4] core-shell structured polymers, [5] and dendrimers [6] in which the localized hydrophobic environments show interesting properties. These artificial long alkyl chain systems, as well as biomembranes, [7] which are bilayered aggregates of long organic phosphates, are typically structurally dispersed. The structural disparities result in a distribution of properties. Here we report discrete and well-defined structures of alkyl chains confined within a 5 nm spherical coordination shell (Figure 1). The shell framework quantitatively assembles from 12 Pd 2+ ions and 24 nonlinear ligands [8, 9] and sharply defines the boundary of the interior hydrophobic region of the long alkyl chains. Furthermore, the nature of hydrophobic interior can be simply tuned by varying the length of the pendant alkyl chains.