Supramolecular Chirality of the Two-Component Supramolecular Copolymer Gels: Who Determines the Handedness?

Natural supramolecular systems typically contain a wide variety of chiral molecules. Studying the chiral conflict within different supramolecular assemblies not only can be very helpful for understanding the inherent principles of supramolecular chirality but also can guide the preparation of many functional chiral soft matters. For assemblies containing only structurally similar molecules, supramolecular chirality is determined by enantiomeric excess of molecular building blocks. For supramolecular systems assembled by structurally different chiral molecules, however, the optical activity of the systems and the chiral conflict among different chiral molecules can be very complex. We found rather unexpected results regarding the chiral conflict within two-component supramolecular copolymer gels in this study. The handedness of the chirality of supramolecular copolymer gels, which were formed by the coassembly of bolaamphiphilic L-histidine derivatives and tartaric acids, was found to be dependent on the ordering molecular packing, instead of the preponderance of certain chiral molecules.