posted on 2022-05-26, 17:39authored byShuang Fu, Niu Niu, Shanliang Song, Dingyuan Yan, Jinyin Ge, Jiangao Li, Zhengli Peng, Lianwei Li, Yu Xiong, Lei Wang, Dong Wang, Ben Zhong Tang
Self-assembly
of dendritic amphiphiles has attracted great attention
due to their various applications in fundamental and practical areas.
However, it still remains a great challenge to prepare dendritic amphiphiles
with a facile protocol because of their complex molecular structures
and tedious synthesis process. Herein, we develop a simple and straightforward
strategy to construct dendritic amphiphiles with aggregation-induced
emission characteristics by using tetraphenylethene derivatives as
the bridge fragment. These dendritic amphiphiles can self-assemble
into well-defined structures, and their supramolecular topological
structures can be further transformed from spheres into other morphological
structures, such as tubules and nanofibers, showing the diversiform
self-assembly manipulated by the solvent effect. Furthermore, the
supramolecular materials well performed as fluorescent photosensitizers
for fluorescence image-guided photodynamic cancer therapy, ascribing
to the high-performance fluorescence emission, good biocompatibility,
and high electron donor–acceptor strength characteristics.
This work provides a new way to construct functional dendritic amphiphiles
and greatly broadens their applications in supramolecular chemistry
and material science.