News
05/06/09
Professor Rivera’s work on self-assembled supramolecules was published in JACS.
Self-assembly is used in nature to build myriads of functional nanostructures that sustain life in our planet. In the last couple of years, the Rivera group has developed a series of guanosine derivatives that are useful for making self-assembled nanostructures. They have devised strategies by which the number of subunits, and hence the size, shape and other properties, in such nanostructures can be precisely controlled. This control is achieved by either the nature of the molecules themselves or by virtue of the environment in which they are formed.
In their latest article (JACS,2009,131, 3186), Rivera and coworkers describe that such nanostructures can be switched between two different states containing eight and sixteen subunits. The reversible switching is achieved by simply changing the solvent in which the structure is formed. They are currently applying this and other strategies for the development of smart nanostructures for drug-delivery and DNA-recognition.