Macromonomer Design and Preparation

A short oligo(L-alanine) segment was envisioned to induce self-assembly into high-aspect-ratio ID aggregates in solution via the formation of (5-sheets. 

A diacetylene moiety served as the polymerizable unit and was incorporated into the hydrogen-bonding array via short flexible linkers such that minor changes of the geometry during the polymerization might be compensated. 

Finally, different types of end groups were included in order to help control the hierarchical structure formation and introduce additional functionalities for specific applications at a later stage. 

In summary, the advantages of the chosen synthetic strategy are its modularity and the utilization of well-established and convenient peptide chemistry procedures. Thus, a variety of macromonomers could be prepared on the multi-gram 

---