Contents
1. Introduction Page No.
2. Chemical fuel-driven reaction networks Page No.
3. Fuel-driven temporary materials Page No.
3.1. Fuel-driven temporary gels Page No.
3.1.1. Temporary gels based on carboxyl group. Page No.
3.1.2. Temporary gels based on pH-responsive gelator. Page No.
3.1.3. ATP-driven temporary gels.
Page No.
3.1.4. H2O2-driven temporary gels. Page
No.
3.1.5. Other fuel-driven temporary gels. Page No.
3.2. Self-erased ink Page No.
3.3. Temporary nanoreactor Page No.
3.4. Temporary self-healable materials Page No.
3.5. Temporary nanochannel Page No.
4. Challenges and perspectives. Page No.
1. Introduction
Molecular self-assembly is one of the
important bridges that connect chemical science and life science. Living
organisms actually consist of
delicate structures formed by the
self-assembly of biomolecules. Thus, a great effort has been made to
investigate the self-assembly of various natural or artificial
molecules. Plenty of functional materials on the basis of molecular
self-assembly have been successfully constructed. [1-5] However, the
functionality of the present examples of artificial self-assembly is
still far from those in living organisms, because most of the reported
artificial self-assembled structures, including the micelles, vesicles,
membranes, etc. are static under thermodynamic equilibrium. While thein vivo self-assembly is usually out-of-equilibrium, dynamic,
temporary, and varied by the drive of external energy. Hence, a class of
special self-assembly named “dissipative self-assembly”(DSA), which
refers to the self-assembly that is driven by external energy input, has
drawn extensive attention in recent years. [6-9] Unlike spontaneous
self-assembly under thermodynamic equilibrium, the ordered structure
formed by DSA is usually temporary and decays with energy dissipation. A
large number of self-assemblies in living organisms can be classified as
DSA. For example, DSA of actin networks and microtubules driven by
adenosine triphosphate (ATP) or its analogs. It plays an essential role
in various cellular processes, such as the formation of the
cytoskeleton, intracellular transportation, and cell motility.
[10-12].