Bottom-up multicomponent molecular self-assembly is an efficient approach to fabricate and manipulate chiral nanostructures and their chiroptical activities such as the Cotton effect and circular polarized luminescence (CPL). However, the… Click to show full abstract
Bottom-up multicomponent molecular self-assembly is an efficient approach to fabricate and manipulate chiral nanostructures and their chiroptical activities such as the Cotton effect and circular polarized luminescence (CPL). However, the integrated coassembly suffers from spontaneous and inherent systematic pathway complexity with low yield and poor fidelity. Consequently, a rational design of chiral self-assembled systems with more than two components remains a significant challenge. Herein, a modularized, ternary molecular self-assembly strategy that generates chiroptically active materials at diverse hierarchical levels is reported. N-terminated aromatic amino acids appended with binding sites for charge transfer and multiple hydrogen bonds undergo the evolution of supramolecular chirality with unique handedness and luminescent color, generating abundant CPL emission with high luminescence dissymmetry factor values in precisely controlled modalities. Ternary coassembly facilitates high-water-content hydrogel formation constituted by super-helical nanostructures, demonstrating a helix to toroid topological transition. This discovery would shed light on developing complicated multicomponent systems in mimicking biological coassembly events.
               
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