Temporal control over self-assembly and helicity of supramolecular polymers

Abstract

Supramolecular polymerization has been inspired from biological systems such as microtubules and actin filaments that self-assemble from small monomers and are functional in their aggregated state. In synthetic systems, self-assembly of small molecules to construct supramolecular polymers has been well investigated for understanding the mechanism of polymerization and role of the noncovalent interactions. These understandings has enabled us to pre-program monomers to attain a variety of morphologies and properties under thermodynamic control and however they lack in temporal programming. On the other hand, biological systems which are the source of inspiration for self-assembly have spatio-temporal control over their self-organization owing to the nonequilibrium instability of these self-organized state. Herein, we discuss conventional thermodynamic self-assembly based on their mechanism and a comprehensive review of various strategies utilized to obtain assemblies under non-equilibrium and for a temporal control over their self-organization.