Sparkling Morphological Changes and Spontaneous Movements of Self-assemblies in Water Induced by Chemical Reactions

This review covers the drastic morphological changes, including division or birthing dynamics, and even spontaneous movements performed by molecular self-assemblies constructed by reactive amphiphiles with the imine group that connects hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties. It turns out that the formation (dehydro-condensation) of such amphiphiles or their cleavage (hydrolysis) into individual moieties occurs depending on the reaction fields, such as in membranes, or at interfaces between water and self-assemblies constructed by the amphiphiles. Moreover these chemical conversions induce outstanding dynamics aforementioned. Hence these findings give a hint to understand hierarchical dynamics occurring in a living system.