巨大な中空球状錯体を骨格として構築した生体分子インターフェースの開発

抄録

The clusters of biomolecules have an important role as recognition interface in living systems, where the weak molecular recognition of each biomolecular unit is efficiently enhanced by the dense assembly of the units to realize strong affinity. The mimic of these molecular designs has been explored, but the structural deviations or small number of clustered units are not satisfactory as the model of natural interfaces. In our recent projects, we synthesized biomolecular clusters by anchoring a biomolecular unit to an organic ligand followed by assembling the ligands with transition metal ions to obtain self-assembled spherical complexes. Owing to the self-assembly nature of the coordination complexes, the number of introduced biomolecular units is strictly defined, the molecular sizes are huge with the diameter of several to ten nanometers, and the synthesis is quite simple and quantitative. With the variety of sugar, DNA, or peptide clusters, we demonstrated that the huge clusters work as functional interfaces and realized the application to biomolecular or inorganic recognition and further extended to the template synthesis exploiting the recognition functions and the unique three-dimensional shape.