Hydrogelators of cyclotriveratrylene derivatives.
Developing cavity-based supramolecular hydrogels is in its infancy because not many such hydrogelators are available. Reported herein is our creation of rigid cavitand cyclotriveratrylene (CTV) based hydrogelators from the molecular backbones of CTVs that were in limited cases shown to form organogels. For doing so deprotonable -COOH or protonable -NH(2) was introduced as terminal group into the rigid and hydrophobic CTV backbones. We thus successfully obtained optically anisotropic supramolecular hydrogels from these new CTVs hydrogelators with excellent thermostability and high tolerance towards strong electrolytes. The obtained CTV-1 and CTV-2 hydrogels are luminescent and exhibit reversible gel-to-sol and sol-to-gel transitions upon pH variations. The success in creating CTV-1 and CTV-2 hydrogelators on the basis of the skeleton of a CTV-organogelator suggests that balancing the hydrophilic and hydrophobic characters of the ionic and hydrophobic moieties well in the gelator molecule is important for designing a promising hydrogelator.
Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and the MOE Key Laboratory of Analytical Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China.
Fu
F
Cai
Jiang-Shan
JS
Shen
Jin-He
JH
Wang
Han
H
Zhang
Jin-Song
JS
Zhao
Er-Man
EM
Zeng
Yun-Bao
YB
Jiang