Journal
NATURE CHEMISTRY
Volume 6, Issue 3, Pages 188-195Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1849
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Funding
- KAKENHI [20750097]
- Scientific Research for Priority Area 'Coordination Programming' [2107]
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Government of Japan
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [21108010, 20750097] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Various conventional reactions in polymer chemistry have been translated to the supramolecular domain, yet it has remained challenging to devise living supramolecular polymerization. To achieve this, self-organization occurring far from thermodynamic equilibrium-ubiquitously observed in nature-must take place. Prion infection is one example that can be observed in biological systems. Here, we present an 'artificial infection' process in which porphyrin-based monomers assemble into nanoparticles, and are then converted into nanofibres in the presence of an aliquot of the nanofibre, which acts as a 'pathogen'. We have investigated the assembly phenomenon using isodesmic and cooperative models and found that it occurs through a delicate interplay of these two aggregation pathways. Using this understanding of the mechanism taking place, we have designed a living supramolecular polymerization of the porphyrin-based monomers. Despite the fact that the polymerization is non-covalent, the reaction kinetics are analogous to that of conventional chain growth polymerization, and the supramolecular polymers were synthesized with controlled length and narrow polydispersity.
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