The exploitation of aromatic rod-like building blocks for the engineering of synthetic nanostructures is a promising area of research. Thus, diverse molecular structures are being created as a means of manipulating aggregation structure. For example, incorporation of a rigid rod segment into amphiphilic molecular architectures leads to a number of well-defined nanostructures, including bundles, barrels, tubules, ribbons, and vesicles, in solution state. Recently, we have demonstrated that dumbbell-shaped molecules consisting of an aromatic stem segment and hydrophilic dendritic branches, in aqueous solution, self-assemble into helical nanofibers in which the rod segments stack on top of each other with mutual rotation. These results imply that incorporation of hydrophobic branches at one end of a molecular dumbbell further extends the supramolecular organization capabilities of stiff rod-like segments due to enhanced hydrophobic interactions.
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