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Updated: Jun 1, 2026

Microfluidic Preparation of Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Actuators
Published on: May 20, 2018
Columnarly assembled liquid-crystalline peptidic macrocycles unidirectionally orientable over a large area by an
Kohei Sato1, Yoshimitsu Itoh, Takuzo Aida
1Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan.
Abstract:
Being inspired by naturally occurring peptidic macrocycles, we developed liquid-crystalline (LC) compounds 1 and 2 that are capable of self-assembling into hexagonal columnar mesophases over a wide temperature range that includes room temperature. Their bowl-shaped macrocyclic cores are conformationally robust because of the presence of internal H-bonds, while the columnar assembly is ensured by intermolecular H-bonding interactions involving the exocyclic amide units. When an electric field was applied to their LC films from a direction orthogonal to the film plane, the columns were oriented homeotropically over a large area.
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