Hierarchical Self-Assembly of Achiral Amino Acid Derivatives into Dendritic Chiral Nanotwists

The organogel formation and self-assembly of a glycine-based achiral molecule were investigated. It has been found that the compound could gel organic solvents either at a lower temperature with lower concentration or at room temperature with higher concentration, which showed different self-assembled nanostructures. At a low temperature of −15 °C, the compound self-assembled into fibrous structures, whereas it formed distinctive flat microbelts at room temperature. When the organogel with nanofibers formed at −15 °C was brought into an ambient condition, chiral twist nanostructures were immediately evolved, which subsequently transferred to a giant microbelt through a hierarchical dendritic twist with the time. Although the compound is achiral, it formed chiral twist with both left- and right-handed twist structures simultaneously. When a trace analogical chiral trigger, l-alanine or d-alanine derivative, was added, a complete homochiral dendritic twist was obtained. Interestingly, a reverse process, i.e. the transformation of the microbelts into twists, could occur upon dilution of the organogel with microbelt structure. During the dilution, both left- and right-handed chiral twists could be formed again. Interestingly, the same branch from the microbelt formed the twist with the same handedness. A combination of the density functional theory (DFT), molecular mechanics (MM), and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations demonstrates that the temperature-induced twisting of the bilayer is responsible for the morphological transformation and evolution of the dendrite twist. This research sheds new light on the hierarchical transformation of the chiral structures from achiral molecules via controlled self-assembly.