A novel organogel of breviscapine via supramolecular self-assembly in DCM

Abstract

Supramolecular gels provide great advantages for technological applications. More recently, the natural product gelators (NPGs) has been revealed as an interesting strategy to produce soft materials while combining stimuli-responsiveness and biological activities. However, the discovered NPGs till now was quite rare in spite of the enormous quantity of natural products. Herein, a supramolecular organogel with novel architecture was reported for the first time. Breviscapine (Bre), a natural flavonoid glycoside, was found to be spontaneously forming gels in dichloromethane during the ultrasonication-aided anti-solvent precipitation process. The corresponding xerogel were revealed a spherical network of packed microspheres and maintained a certain crystalline state. Hydrogen bonding and π-π stacking were confirmed as the main driving forces for the self-assembly of the organogel by FTIR, NMR and molecular dynamic simulation analysis. Moreover, the obtained Bre organogel showed excellent solvent-retention property and higher skin penetration rate than the pure drug. These would be of great benefit for future discovery of new NPGs and exploration on novel applications of NPG-based gels.