Supramolecular chemistry info Chemical Man

Supramolecular chemistry is the domain of chemistry beyond that of molecules that focuses on the chemical systems made up of a discrete number of assembled molecular subunits or components. The forces responsible for the spatial organization may vary from weak (intermolecular forces, electrostatic or hydrogen bonding) to strong (covalent bonding), provided that the degree of electronic coupling between the molecular component remains small with respect to relevant energy parameters of the component. While traditional chemistry focuses on the covalent bond, supramolecular chemistry examines the weaker and reversible noncovalent interactions between molecules.. These forces include hydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi-pi interactions and electrostatic effects. Important concepts that have been demonstrated by supramolecular chemistry include molecular self-assembly, folding, molecular recognition, host-guest chemistry, mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures, and dynamic covalent chemistry.The study of non-covalent interactions is crucial to understanding many biological processes from cell structure to vision that rely on these forces for structure and function. Biological systems are often the inspiration for supramolecular research.

Applications

Materials technology

Supramolecular chemistry has found many applications,, in particular molecular self-assembly processes have been applied to the development of new materials. Large structures can be readily accessed using bottom-up synthesis as they are composed of small molecules requiring fewer steps to synthesize. Thus most of the bottom-up approaches to nanotechnology are based on supramolecular chemistry.Many smart materials  are based on molecular recognition.
Catalysis

Main article: Supramolecular catalysis

A major application of supramolecular chemistry is the design and understanding of catalysts and catalysis. Noncovalent interactions are extremely important in catalysis, binding reactants into conformations suitable for reaction and lowering the transition state energy of reaction. Template-directed synthesis is a special case of supramolecular catalysis. Encapsulation systems such as micelles, dendrimers, and cavitands are also used in catalysis to create microenvironments suitable for reactions (or steps in reactions) to progress that is not possible to use on a macroscopic scale.

Medicine

Design based on supramolecular chemistry has led to numerous applications in the creation of functional biomaterials and therapeutics. Supramolecular biomaterials afford a number of modular and generalizable platforms with tunable mechanical, chemical and biological properties. These include systems based on supramolecular assembly of peptides, host-guest macrocycles, high-affinity hydrogen bonding, and metal-ligand interactions.

A supramolecular approach has been used extensively to create artificial ion channels for the transport of sodium and potassium ions into and out of cells.

Supramolecular chemistry is also important to the development of new pharmaceutical therapies by understanding the interactions at a drug binding site. The area of drug delivery has also made critical advances as a result of supramolecular chemistry providing encapsulation and targeted release mechanisms. In addition, supramolecular systems have been designed to disrupt protein-protein interactions that are important to cellular function.

Data storage and processing

Supramolecular chemistry has been used to demonstrate computation functions on a molecular scale. In many cases, photonic or chemical signals have been used in these components, but electrical interfacing of these units has also been shown by supramolecular signal transduction devices. Data storage has been accomplished by the use of molecular switches with photochromic and photoisomerizable units, by electrochromic and redox-switchable units, and even by molecular motion. Synthetic molecular logic gates have been demonstrated on a conceptual level. Even full-scale computations have been achieved by semi-synthetic DNA computers.