In collaboration with the group of Ivan Huc at the European Institute of Chemistry and Biology in Bordeaux, we have prepared several new assemblies containing foldamers (oligo-quinolines that fold up into well-defined helical secondary structures in solution) as subcomponents, linked together via metal templation into well-defined structures. As shown below, copper(I) generates an assembly in which the foldamers are roughly orthogonal to each other, whereas iron(II) creates a structure in which the foldamer subcomponents are roughly parallel.
Now that the ground rules have been deciphered, present work is targeting larger assemblies containing multiple foldamer subunits, arrayed in such a way as to create structures containing void spaces of well-defined size and environment. Molecular recognition or catalysis might be possible within these void spaces, as with proteins.