Design of Supramolecular Biomaterials Greatly Enhancing Multivalent Binding with Biological Systems

Abstract

Supramolecular Science has become an important issue in constructing molecular architectures through intermolecular forces by mimicking molecular assemblies in nature. Polyrotaxane is defined as a molecular assembly in which many cyclic compounds are threaded onto a linear polymeric chain capped with bulky end-groups. In the last decade, a variety of polyrotaxanes has been extensively designed as to act as novel biomaterials in our group. In this article, enhanced multivalent binding with biological systems has been introduced throughout our systematic studies on ligand-immobilized polyrotaxanes. Our studies have revealed such an enhanced binding effect seen in the polyrotaxanes is due to the combination of introducing multiple copies of the ligands and their highly mobile nature due to the inter-locked structure. A new insight of designing functional biomaterials will emerge from suchstructural characteristics of the polyrotaxanes.