The primary driving force for the synthetic scientist — regardless of whether it may be a synthetic chemist or biologist — used to be fascination with the beauty of molecular architectures and with the ability to create them from simple building blocks. Synthetic chemistry, supramolecular self-assembly, automated nucleic acid synthesis and recombinant DNA technologies for protein expression have made many different target structures readily accessible. Despite many remaining synthetic challenges, it can be argued that we have built up sufficient muscle to shift the discussion somewhat from the creative technologies to the strategies that add utility to beauty. This issue gathers reviews on a range of technically very different approaches that are unified in their goal, to create functional assemblies, displaying a variety of useful properties.
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