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].