Hierarchical self-assembly of organic prolate nanospheroids from hydrophobic rosette nanotubes

Supramolecular synthesis emerged recently as a new formalism to devise complex architectures held through noncovalent forces. Much of the research endeavor has been devoted to the use of H-bonds as the alphabet for chemical information encoding, and the structures expressed have spanned the range of dimensions and shapes, from discrete to infinite networks. Here we describe the synthesis and characterization of a GwedgeC base bearing two C12 alkyl chains, which undergoes a solvent-controlled multistep hierarchical self-assembly process into lamellar prolate nanospheroids. These assemblies were characterized by AFM, SEM, TEM, XRD, and SAXS, and a mechanism for their formation is proposed.