A novel transparent supercapacitor with a photoactive layer and a capacitive structure integrated into one device is presented here. This device has achieved the combined abilities of self-charging under illumination and self-storage of photogenerated electrical signals. The photogenerated current density is about 2 mA g −1 . The specific capacitance is about 140 F g −1 . Its photosensing can function without an external bias voltage given by a heavy power source, so it has great potential to be integrated into portable equipment. Moreover, this device can be easily assembled through a packaging-free process by using allsolid-state gel electrolytes.

Information contained in the sequences of biological polymers such as DNA and protein is crucial to determining their function. Lipids are not generally thought of as information-containing molecules. However, from a supramolecular perspective, the number of possible combinations of lipids in a mixture is comparable to the complexity of DNA or proteins. Here, we test the idea that an organic composome can exhibit molecular recognition. We use water/octanol as a model two-phase system and investigate the effect of organic solutes in different combinations in the organic phase on selective partitioning of two water-soluble dyes (Brilliant Blue FCF and Allura Red AC) from the aqueous phase into the organic phase. We found that variation in the concentration of the surfactant cetyltrimethylamonium bromide (CTAB) in the octanol phase alone was sufficient to cause a switch in selectivity, with low CTAB concentrations being selective for the red dye and high CTAB concentrations being selective for the blue dye. Other organic components were added to the organic phase to introduce molecular diversity into the composome and directed evolution was used to optimize the relative concentrations of the solutes. An improvement of selective partitioning in the heterogeneous system over the pure CTAB solution was observed. The results indicate that supramolecular composomes are sufficient for molecular recognition processes in a way analogous to nucleic acid aptamers.

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