Convergent process, self-assembly

Fundamentally self-assembly is a convergent process in which a number of components assemble into, ideally, a single final, stable structure. Self-assembly is thus very distinct from chemical emergence which is a divergent process in which complexity evolves over time. 

The synthesis and isolation of many of these receptors proved to be quite tedious, however, although occasionally convergent strategies could be used. We therefore looked for an alternative way to build up such structures and decided to make use of self-assembly processes of metal complexes [4] to build up self assembled oligo(BINOL) analogs [5], (How similar metal complexes can be used to stabilize peptide microstructures is discussed in Chapter 1.3.)... 

Considerable challenges lie ahead and the more significant one is the dynamic marriage between supramolecular self-assembly and the sol-gel process, which kinetically and sterochemically might communicate in order to converge toward self-organized functional hybrid materials. The weak interactions (H-bonds, coordination or van der Waals interactions, etc.) positioning of the molecular components... 

Dynamic self-assembly of supramolecular systems prepared under thermodynamic control may in principle be connected to a kinetically controlled sol-gel process in order to extract and select the interpenetrated hybrid networks. Such dynamic convergence between supramolecular self-assembly and inorganic sol— gel processes, which synergistically communicate, leads to higher self-organized hybrid materials with increased micrometric scales. 

In the present context, self-assembly may be defined as the process by which a supramolecular species forms spontaneously from its components. For the majority of synthetic systems it appears to be a beautifully simple convergent process, giving rise to the assembled target in a straightforward manner. ... 

An example of a stoichiometrically-driven self-assembly is depicted in (Figure 7).22 The AB2 monomer (15) contains an acetonitrile co-ligand. When a solution of (15) is heated under vacuum, dendritic aggregates (16) spontaneously form by a convergent self-assembly process, in which the labile acetonitrile co-ligands are replaced with pendant cyanomethyl groups from other molecules. The... 

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