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New building blocks
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A chemist building a dream.
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A way to make nanoscale balls and tubes using the same building blocks
has been designed by Jerry
Atwood and his team at the University of Missouri in Columbia. The
technique avoids the need to make complicated changes to a synthetic
scheme to build different molecular and could speed up the development of
new materials, biomimetic molecular devices, and molecular electronics.
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Calixarene building blocks self assemble into TMV-like tubes.
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The Missouri researchers have combined p-sulfonatocalix[4]arenes,
which are shaped like truncated cones using the principles of self-
assembly to create attractions between the units. They form curved
structures in a manner analogous to the self assembly of the protein
wedges of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) but on a smaller scale. The
researchers have so far "grown" nanometre-scale spheres and needle-
shaped tubular crystals, some up to one centimetre long.
Science, 1999, 285, 1049 [full paper available online]
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