From symmetrical building blocks to asymmetrical assemblies

What is it about?

Foldamers are linear molecules, which fold similarly to biological molecules, such as proteins. In this work we observed that foldamers willingly bind fluoride anions and the binding facilitates in the solid state the formation of asymmetrical assemblies even if the building blocks are symmetrical. Especially interesting was the observation of homochiral crystallisation instead of racemic mixture.

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Why is it important?

This kind of formation of chiral crystal structures and especially crystallisation of homochiral crystals out of chiral building blocks is not a common phenomenon.