Turing patterns by supramolecular self-assembly of a single salphen building block

Martha V Escárcega-Bobadilla; Mauricio Maldonado-Domínguez; Margarita Romero-Ávila; Gustavo A Zelada-Guillén

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104545

Turing patterns by supramolecular self-assembly of a single salphen building block

iScience. 2022 Jun 7;25(7):104545. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104545. eCollection 2022 Jul 15.

Authors

Martha V Escárcega-Bobadilla¹, Mauricio Maldonado-Domínguez^{1

2}, Margarita Romero-Ávila¹, Gustavo A Zelada-Guillén¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Circuito Escolar s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico.
² Department of Computational Chemistry, J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Dolejškova 3, 18223 Prague 8, Czech Republic.

Abstract

In the 1950s, Alan Turing showed that concerted reactions and diffusion of activating and inhibiting chemical species can autonomously generate patterns without previous positional information, thus providing a chemical basis for morphogenesis in Nature. However, access to these patterns from only one molecular component that contained all the necessary information to execute agonistic and antagonistic signaling is so far an elusive goal, since two or more participants with different diffusivities are a must. Here, we report on a single-molecule system that generates Turing patterns arrested in the solid state, where supramolecular interactions are used instead of chemical reactions, whereas diffusional differences arise from heterogeneously populated self-assembled products. We employ a family of hydroxylated organic salphen building blocks based on a bis-Schiff-base scaffold with portions responsible for either activation or inhibition of assemblies at different hierarchies through purely supramolecular reactions, only depending upon the solvent dielectric constant and evaporation as fuel.

Keywords: Chemistry; Organic chemistry.