Maintaining the intrinsic features of mesophases is critically important when employing phospholipid self-assemblies to mimic biomembranes. Inorganic solid surfaces provide platforms to support, guide, and analyze organic self-assemblies but impose upon them a tendency to form well-ordered phases not often found in biomembranes. To address this, we measured mesophase formation in a thiolate sel...

Highly uniform 3-D ordered macroporous spheres in regular arrays were produced by a double templating process. The first template of larger silica balls produced the polymer skeleton for guiding the shape and size of the self-assembled superstructure of smaller polymeric balls, which are introduced subsequently into the internal space of the skeleton. The second templating with inorganic precur...

Low-cost renewable lignin has been used as a precursor to produce porous carbons. However, to date, it has not been easy to obtain high surface area porous carbon without activation processes or templating agents. Here, we demonstrate that low molecular weight lignin yields highly porous carbon with more graphitization through direct carbonization without additional activation processes or temp...

The use of biological molecules as platforms for templating and nanofabrication is an emerging field. Here, we use designed protein building blocks based on small repetitive units (consensus tetratricopeptide repeat - CTPR) to generate fibrillar linear nanostructures by controlling the self-assembly properties of the units. We fully characterize the kinetics and thermodynamics of the assembly a...

Zirconium oxide (ZrO2) has generated wide interest because of its potential in applications such as solid oxide fuel cells, catalysts and optical devices. In these applications, it is important to control the grain size of the material and increase the surface area by introducing porosity with tailored pore size. This paper presents a synthesis route for the preparation of mesoporous zirconia u...

Block copolymers have been proposed for self-assembled nanolithography because they can spontaneously form well-ordered nanoscale periodic patterns of lines or dots in a rapid, low-cost process. By templating the selfassembly, patterns of increasing complexity can be generated, for example arrays of lines with bends or junctions. This offers the possibility of using a sparse template, written b...

The influence of organic additives, β-cyclodextrin, HEDTA, L-aspartic acid and L-glutamic acid on crystal growth of calcium carbonate via vapour diffusion method has been investigated. In the absence of additive, regular rhombohedral calcium carbonate crystal habit resulted. Whereas in presence of additive, calcite with truncated, aggregated rhombohedral sub crystals and elongated hexagonal mor...

The isostructural title compounds, {(C7H7N2)2[SnI4]} n , (1), and {(C7H5F2N2)2[SnI4]} n , (2), show a layered perovskite-type structure composed of anionic {[SnI4](2-)} n sheets parallel to (100), which are decorated on both sides with templating benzimidazolium or 5,6-di-fluoro-benzimidazolium cations, respectively. These planar organic heterocycles mainly form N-H⋯I hydrogen bonds to the term...

Colloidal nanocrystals exhibit a wide range of size- and shape-dependent properties and have found application in myriad fields, incuding optics, electronics, mechanics, drug delivery and catalysis, to name but a few. Synthetic protocols that enable the simple and convenient production of colloidal nanocrystals with controlled size, shape and composition are therefore of key general importance....

Nature abounds in hierarchical structures that are formed through highly coupled and often concurrent synthesis and assembly processes over both molecular and long-range length scales. The existence of these structures such as abalones and diatoms has both biological and evolutionary significance. It has been a long-sought goal to mimic the natural processes responsible for these exquisite arch...