Evolution of Helical Foldamers

Nanostructured Molecular Architectures

“…These folding oligomers, or foldmers, involve an oligomeric unit with a rigidified backbone that involves at least one additional set of interactions (e.g., hydrogen bonds) to minimize conformational freedom (Gong, 2001;Sanford and Gong, 2003). This type of oligomer can be viewed as a tape.…”

“…Gong and co-workers (Gong, 2001;Sanford and Gong, 2003) produced foldmers with tunable interior cavities based on oligoamides and polyamides with different backbone curvatures and thus different, nanosized (10-60 m) interior cavities that are featured by amide oxygen atoms and are thus electrostatically negatively charged. The cavity, therefore, is hydrophilic and can easily include polar nanoparticles such as inorganic quantum dots for photonic applications.…”

Molecular Recognition with Linear Molecules as Receptors

“…In the past decade, a large number of synthetic molecules have been designed to adopt defined conformations that are stabilized by discrete noncovalent forces. Advances along this line have led to the emerging field of foldamer chemistry [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Because of their preorganized cyclic conformation, many of the folded scaffolds give rise to a defined cavity that is able to hold a neutral or ionic species.…”

Understanding the folding process of synthetic polymers by small-molecule folding agents

“…Several excellent reviews describe the structurally diverse range of foldamers that have been studied so far. 1,[3][4][5][6][7][8] It is evident from these reviews that a majority of these systems utilize H-bonding as the primary structuredirecting interaction and, more importantly, the backbone of most of the foldamers have been designed to possess restricted conformational freedom.…”