Understanding and Learning from Biochemistry

8 Motherwell, W. B., Bingham, M. J., Six, Y., Recent progress in the design and synthesis of artificial enzymes . 

Biological systems have provided much of the inspiration for the development of supramolecular chemistry. Many synthetic supramolecular systems have been designed to mimic the structure or function of more complex biological processes. Such artifical, abiotic (non-biological) molecules or reaction mimics are termed models. By this we mean that, on a smaller scale, the artificial systems resemble, and help chemists to understand some or all of the properties of the real, biological chemistry. The concept of a biological model has been summarised beautifully by Donald Cram in his Nobel Prize lecture  

The design of molecular hosts, guests, and their complexes (Nobel Lecture) , Angew. 

Receptor-substrate binding is reversible, and is governed by thermodynamics. As discussed in Section 1.7, binding selectivity represents quantitatively a ratio of binding constants of a receptor 

Supramolecular Chemistry, 2nd edition J. W. Steed and J. L. Atwood 2009 John Wiley Sons, Ltd ISBN 978-0-470-51233-3 

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