A Journey through 12 Years of Interacting Molecules: From Artificial Amino Acid Receptors to the Recognition of Biomolecules and Switchable Nanomaterials

Research in supramolecular chemistry has been carried out in my laboratory for the past 12 years. Intrigued by the fascinating power of supramolecular chemistry, as seen in biomolecular recognition events in nature, we started out by trying to mimic the basic principles of such recognition events in small artificial model systems. Our first targets were amino acids and oligopeptides. We then moved on to proteins and nucleic acids, and we started to develop supramolecular systems that, besides simple binding, also featured functions, e. g. shutting down enzymes or allowing gene delivery into cells. In recent years and in a completely different yet related field, we have begun to develop self-assembling nanomaterials. The basic idea for this derived from an accidental discovery of the interesting self-assembling properties of a simple zwitterion, which was a synthetic intermediate on the route to our amino acid receptors. This personal account summarizes this journey and is intended not only to present the most-important findings from our laboratory so far, but also to shed light on how all these projects developed over the years and how our journey took us to where we are now. 1 Introduction 2 How It All Began 3 The Beginning: The Design of a New Oxoanion Binding Site 4 Tailor-Made Receptors for Small Peptides 5 Combinatorial Development of Peptide Receptors 6 From Small Peptides to Proteins 7 Nucleic Acids as Targets 8 Self-Assembling Zwitterions 9 pH-Switchable Nanostructures 10 Conclusion