Dynamic diversity of synthetic supramolecular polymers in water as revealed by hydrogen/deuterium exchange.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28504253.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms15420 and PMC identifier 5440672.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Numerous self-assembling molecules have been synthesized aiming at mimicking both the structural and dynamic properties found in living systems. Here we show the application of hydrogen/deuterium exchange (HDX) mass spectrometry (MS) to unravel the nanoscale organization and the structural dynamics of synthetic supramolecular polymers in water. We select benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamide (BTA) derivatives that self-assemble in H<sub>2</sub>O to illustrate the strength of this technique for supramolecular polymers. The BTA structure has six exchangeable hydrogen atoms and we follow their exchange as a function of time after diluting the H<sub>2</sub>O solution with a 100-fold excess of D<sub>2</sub>O. The kinetic H/D exchange profiles reveal that these supramolecular polymers in water are dynamically diverse; a notion that has previously not been observed using other techniques. In addition, we report that small changes in the molecular structure can be used to control the dynamics of synthetic supramolecular polymers in water.