The challenge of assembling molecules into materials

Abstract

AbstractLinear organic chains and their architectural derivatives such as branched and crosslinked macromolecules have been the main focus of polymer science for many decades. A new direction which should be pursued in the field is the exploration of polymers as “nanostructures”. This exploration would study synthetic polymers as shape invariant objects with nanoscale dimensions which resemble the folded proteins of nature. Such synthetic macromolecules would have well defined shapes which may even include topographical features. Ideally, the definition of shape could include well defined dimensions as well, but molecular objects of common shape but varying dimensions could also exhibit interesting properties. One could for example envision polymers as flat plates (two‐dimensional polymers), discs, ellipsoids, spheres with cavities, parallelepipeds, among many other possible shapes. Such objects must have fairly high molar masses, possibly in the range of hundreds to thousands of kilodaltons, and would therefore not be accessible as chemical compounds synthesized by conventional methods. At the same time, the prospects of learning “folding rules” for synthetic chemical sequences in a biomimetic approach to molecular nanostructures seems to be an extremely difficult goal at the present time. This is suggested given our contemporary difficulties in understanding the protein folding problem.