Abstract
The fabrication of smart materials is gradually becoming a research focus in nanotechnology and materials science. An important criterion of smart materials is the capacity of stimuli-responsiveness, while another lies in selective recognition. Accordingly, supramolecular host-guest chemistry has proven a promising support for building intelligent, responsive systems; hence, synthetic macrocyclic hosts, such as calixarenes, cucurbiturils, cyclodextrins, and pillararenes, have been used as ideal building blocks. Meanwhile, manipulating and harnessing light artificially is always an intensive attempt for scientists in order to meet the urgent demands of technological developments. Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), known as a well-studied luminescent activity and also a powerful tool in spectroscopic area, has been investigated from various facets, of which the application range has been broadly expanded. In this review, the innovative collaboration between FRET and supramolecular macrocyclic chemistry will be presented and depicted with typical examples. Facilitated by the dynamic features of supramolecular macrocyclic motifs, a large variety of FRET systems have been designed and organized, resulting in promising optical materials with potential for applications in protein assembly, enzyme assays, diagnosis, drug delivery monitoring, sensing, photosynthesis mimicking and chemical encryption.
Highlights
Supramolecular chemistry, since formally proposed and demonstrated to be of great significance in the realization of molecular recognition and assembly through weak and reversible noncovalent interactions, has attracted considerable attention in the fields of chemistry and materials science [1].Artificial complexes with diverse properties and various functions formed via noncovalent forces have been emerging dramatically in recent years [2,3,4]
The simplest and most fundamental way to build up a Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) system with designed host-guest pairs serving as scaffolds or bridges is constructing dye-containing rotaxanes or mechanically-interlocked molecules (MIMs), in that the earliest studies on the localizing effect induced by host-guest chemistry on the fluorophores required a relatively rigid structure for proper placement
Mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis, intramolecular energy transfer was observed from the periphery to the molecular core, attributing to the ideal topology determined by the host-guest pairs
Summary
Supramolecular chemistry, since formally proposed and demonstrated to be of great significance in the realization of molecular recognition and assembly through weak and reversible noncovalent interactions, has attracted considerable attention in the fields of chemistry and materials science [1]. The integration of FRET effects with host-guest chemistry, as a promising resolution to this hindrance, successfully furnished the association and dissociation of the donor-acceptor pair with extraordinary flexibility and controllability due to the distinct properties of stimuli-responsiveness and the selectivity possessed by host-guest interactions. This breakthrough has astoundingly inspired a variety of applications of FRET, including real-time in vivo monitoring of biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins, and structural manipulation [38,39,40], cell imaging, drug delivery [41,42], chemical [43,44]. Biological sensing [45,46,47], photosynthesis mimicking [48,49], and other relative scientific areas, which we will explore in the following part
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