Gas‐Constructed Vesicles with Gas‐Moldable Membrane Architectures

Abstract

Integrating gas as a main building block into nanomaterial construction is a challenging mission that remains elusive. Herein, we report a gas‐constructed vesicular system formed by CO2 gas and frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs). Two molecular triads bearing three bulky borane and phosphine groups are designed as trivalent disc‐like FLP monomers. CO2, as a gas cross‐linker, can drive the two‐dimensional polymerization of these two FLP monomers, leading to the generation of planar FLP networks that further transform into a thermodynamically favored membranous vesicle structure. Gas‐guided vesicle formation is also applicable to other inert but FLP‐activatable gases. Different gas linkages can form vesicles with distinct architectures, sizes, and morphologies. We envisage that this study would suggest a new concept that exploits gases to fabricate tunable nanomaterials.

Supramolecular vesicle engineering by regulating the assembly of shape-persistent aromatic-hydrazone macrocycles

“…20 Therefore, manipulating vesicle size is essential for the application of vesicles, particularly in nanomedicine [21][22][23] and nanomaterials. 24 Currently, several approaches, including extrusion 25 and solvent displacement, 26 are explored to control the size of traditional vesicles, and for polymer vesicles, the size can be controlled by the hydrophobic/hydrophilic content or the chain length. 27,28 For supramolecular vesicles, their sizes and properties usually depend on the assembly of supramolecular building blocks.…”