Templates, chiral fibers

Chiral Fibers as Templates for Helical Crystallization of Proteins. 207... 

Chiral Fibers as Templates for the Growth of Inorganic Replicas. 209... 

One of the reasons why gels and self-assembled fibers affracf so much attention is their very high potential for applications. The last section of this chapter addresses applications which specifically make use of chirality, such as those based on enantioselective molecular recognition, or those based on the use of chiral fibers as templates for the generation of helical arrays of proteins or of chiral inorganic materials. 

Chiral gelators based on the trflns-l,2-diaminocyclohexane unit were successfully used as templates for the preparation of silica or transition metal oxide nanostructures hehcal fibers or tubes [24-26]. 

To illustrate the diversity of chiral inorganic objects that can be obtained by transcription of chiral self-assembled fibers as organic templates, even double-helical silica has been produced. Gels of a mix of sugar-based gela-tors produce double-helical silica nanotubes by transcription (Fig. 26) [180]. In addition, gels of gemini smfactant 23 (Scheme 4) produce double-helical fibrils of silica [181]. In the latter case, the continuous variation of the pitch... 

Fig. 25 SEM images of right-handed and left-handed helical silica fibers obtained after transcription of organic chiral templates. Reprinted with permission from [164]. Copyright 2000 American Chemical Society...

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