Amongst the areas of supramolecular chemistry, low molecular weight gelators (supramolecular gels) have been considered to be one of the most interesting soft and smart materials due to their ability to construct polymeric structures from small molecules through non-covalent interactions. Recently, metal centres have been incorporated into organic-based gelators that can integrate the interesting and unique properties of metal complexes into gelator molecules that can hardly be achieved by pure organic compounds. In this review, we will give a summary of the recent developments on metallogels and their interesting properties originating from the metal centres.

A new class of amphiphilic anionic platinum(II) bzimpy complexes has been demonstrated to show aggregation in water through Pt···Pt and π-π stacking interactions. An interesting aggregation-partial deaggregation-aggregation process and a morphological transformation from vesicles to nanofibers have been demonstrated. These changes can be systematically controlled by the variation of solvent composition and could readily be probed by UV-vis absorption, emission, NMR, transmission electron microscopy, and even with our naked eyes.