Crystal growth on self-assembled monolayers

This paper illustrates recent work in the field of crystal growth on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). The ability to functionalize a surface with the desired properties and their highly ordered structure makes self-assembled monolayers attractive templates for nucleation and crystal growth. These properties could be surface chemistry that leads to specific intermolecular interactions with the nucleating plane of crystals thereby controlling their morphology and crystal form, hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity to create patterned bifunctional surfaces or chirality to create chiral surfaces. Our research group has used SAMs to control crystal morphology and for resolution of racemates. We have also used a SAMs based method to study the effect of the supersaturation generation rate on polymorph obtained, the effect of pH on polymorphic outcome, concomitant nucleation and for the creation of nano sized organic crystals.