wileyonlinelibrary.comcompositions, structures, and functions for several relevant applications. This goal has been achieved by engineering several nanostructured building blocks on surfaces through many processing methods. 'Bottom-up' methods, including Langmuir-Blodgett (LB), [1][2][3] self-assembled monolayers (SAMs), [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] and Layerby-Layer (LbL) assembly, [14][15][16][17][18][19] have been widely used to modify and effectively tailor the surface properties and simultaneously for assembling desired molecules with a high degree of control over organization and orientation. Therefore, these surface engineering strategies have been used to design and fabricate organized monolayer fi lms (in the case of SAM methodology) and multilayer assemblies (in the case of LB and LbL assembly approaches) with precisely layered structures, compositions, properties, and functions, and thus with enhanced performance at the molecular level. Furthermore, the bulk properties of nanostructured materials and the ability to precisely tailor the surface properties and fi nely tune the physicochemical properties and structures of engineered functional molecular assemblies have been recognized as having paramount importance for the scientifi c and engineering communities due to the broad range of possible applications in the biomedical, electronics, optics, catalysis, and energy research fi elds. [20][21][22] It is well known and commonly agreed that nature provides a great source of endless inspirations for designing highly sophisticated functional materials. Hence, scientists and engineers from different areas of chemistry, physics, engineering, biology, medicine, or biotechnology have been challenged to design and engineer environmentally sensitive biomimetic surfaces that would respond to specifi c external stimuli (e.g. temperature, pH, ionic strength, light, mechanical stress, electric, magnetic and ultrasonic fi elds, electric potential, specifi c biological moieties) in a very controllable and predictable manner, hence adjusting to our demands. Such smart surfaces have been developed by modifying surfaces with stimuliresponsive polymeric materials that ideally exhibit reversible switchable physicochemical properties (i.e., a polymer should be switched repeatedly rather than being designed for a single event), precisely tailored structures, compositions, and functions in response to changes in the surrounding environment.
Layer-by-Layer (LbL) assembly is a simple and highly versatile method to modify surfaces and fabricate robust and highly-ordered nanostructured coatings over almost any type of substrate. Such versatility enables the incorporation of a plethora of building blocks, including materials exhibiting switchable properties, in a single device through a multitude of complementary intermolecular interactions. Switchable materials may undergo reversible physicochemical changes in response toa variety of external triggers. Although most of the works in the literature have been focusing on stimu...
