posted on 2016-03-22, 00:00authored byM. B. Avinash, K. Swathi, K. S. Narayan, T. Govindaraju
We present a bioinspired design strategy
to effectively tailor the assembly of naphthalenediimides (NDIs) into
a wide variety of architectures by functionalizing with amino acid
derivatives. This bioinspired process of custom designing and engineering
molecular assemblies is termed “bioinspired architectonics”.
By employing minute structural mutations in the form of α-substituents
of amino acids, we successfully engineered molecular assembly of NDIs
into zero-dimensional (0D, spheres), one-dimensional (1D, fibers),
and two-dimensional (2D, sheets) architectures. The 2D sheets of phenylalanine
methylester appended NDI 1 showed remarkable bulk electron
mobility of up to 1 cm2 V–1s–1. With the aid of photophysical, diffraction, and microscopy techniques
we rationalize the effect of molecular structure with their ordering
and electronic properties in an effort to find structure–property
correlations via a bioinspired modular approach.