A lifelong Odyssey: from structural and morphological engineering of functional solids to bio-chirogenisis and pathological crystallization

Abstract

This cooperative endeavour first describes early studies in chemical crystallography, encompassing molecular packing modes, characterization of weak hydrogen bonds, the engineering of functional crystals and monitoring of reaction pathways in molecular crystals by x-ray and neutron diffraction. With the design of ‘tailor-made’ auxiliary molecules, it became possible to correlate molecular enantiomerism and crystal enantiomorphism, to control the early stages of crystal nucleation, to resolve enantiomers by crystallization, induce the precipitation of metastable polymorphs, and shed light on the role played by solvent on crystal growth. With such auxiliaries, the structure of mixed crystals was revised and the ability to perform ‘absolute’ asymmetric synthesis in host centrosymmetric crystals demonstrated. With the introduction of grazing incidence synchrotron x-ray diffraction from liquid surfaces it also became possible to design and characterize crystalline thin film architectures at the air–water interface providing a general insight on the mechanism of crystal nucleation at the molecular level, in particular that of ice and cholesterol. Finally the collective knowhow from these studies were crucial for obtaining homochiral peptides prepared from the polymerization of racemates of amphiphilic amino acids dissolved in aqueous solution, and for experiments towards elucidating the pathological crystallization of cholesterol and the malaria pigment in Plasmodium-infected red blood cells.