Supramolecular Assembly Of Macroscopic Building Blocks

Supramolecular chemistry is a chemistry based on molecular assembly and intermolecular bonding. Due to its interdisciplinary feature, supramolecular chemistry has gained wide and close attention in international advanced scientific area. Supramolecular assembly is a significant method to obtain molecular aggregates through intermolecular non-covalent bonding in supramolecular chemistry. For decades, the research on supramolecular assembly mainly focused on building blocks at molecular level or nanoscale such as molecules, polymers, nanoparticles, biomolecules, liquid crystal molecules and so on. However, there are few researches reported on the supramolecular assembly of building blocks with a feature size beyond micrometer scale. Supramolecular assembly of macroscopic building blocks could be used to bridge the fundamental research on supramolecular science at molecular level or nanoscale and the fabrication of bulk supramolecular materials. In this way, supramolecular assembly of macroscopic building blocks could provide a novel strategy for the construction of complex three dimensional ordered structures. Because supramolecular assembly is advantageous in being bottom-up, mild, biocompatible and sufficient with specific recognition systems, three-dimensional ordered structures fabricated through supramolecular assembly of macroscopic building blocks could thus face the potential applications in induced cell differentiation templates and tissue scaffolds in the field of biomaterials.This paper tried to address the problems of "insufficient driving force" and "low binding strength" with the increasing feature size of building blocks in macroscopic supramolecular assembly. The paper has made progress in the following three aspects by investigating both controlled locomotion and supramolecular assembly of macroscopic building blocks:1. having proposed the academic view of "controlled locomotion of macroscopic building blocks is the prerequisite condition to realize their supramolecular assembly"; by investigations on drag reduction, enhanced driving force and adjustment on motion status, efficient controlled locomotion has been realized. Moreover, by combining controlled locomotion of macroscopic building blocks and their hydrophobic-hydrophobic interaction, two dimensional ordered aggregates at interface have been obtained.2. having proposed and developed the concept of "flexible spacing coating", i. e. introducing a highly flowable polyelectrolyte coating of PEI/PAA onto the building block surfaces to decrease surface roughness on one aspect and to increase the freedom degree of the surface supramoiecular groups by using the flexibility and flowability of this very coating. In this way, the supramolecular interactive groups on the building block surface could realize supramolecular interaction following the principle of multivalency, thus realizing supramolecular assembly of macroscopic non-hydrogel building blocks.3. having proposed and developed the method of combining magnetic localization and macroscopic supramolecular assembly, and realized controlled fabrication of 2D/3D ordered structures in a bottom-up way. Moreover, by introducing special building blocks with bio-active species such as biotin or avidin into the interior of the three dimensional ordered structures, we have carried out early experiments and exploring potential applications of the as-prepared three dimensional ordered structures in the field of bio-materials.