Slothful gelation of a dipolar building block by top-down morphology transition from microparticles to nanofibres

An amide-functionalized dipolar building block showed spontaneous self-assembly to micro-particles predominately by H-bonding. Possibly due to inefficient dipolar interaction, it gradually adopted an alternate mode of assembly by anti-parallel dimerization and H-bonding in orthogonal directions leading to a strikingly different nano-fibrillar morphology resulting in unusually slow gelation after 80 h.