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Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels

Naturally occurring single crystals having a multidomain morphology are a counterintuitive phenonomon: the macroscopic appearance is expected to follow the symmetry of the unit cell. Growing such crystals in the lab is a great challenge, especially from organic molecules. We achieve here uniform met...

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Autores principales: di Gregorio, Maria Chiara, Shimon, Linda J. W., Brumfeld, Vlad, Houben, Lothar, Lahav, Michal, van der Boom, Milko E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6971082/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31959750
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13925-5
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author di Gregorio, Maria Chiara
Shimon, Linda J. W.
Brumfeld, Vlad
Houben, Lothar
Lahav, Michal
van der Boom, Milko E.
author_facet di Gregorio, Maria Chiara
Shimon, Linda J. W.
Brumfeld, Vlad
Houben, Lothar
Lahav, Michal
van der Boom, Milko E.
author_sort di Gregorio, Maria Chiara
collection PubMed
description Naturally occurring single crystals having a multidomain morphology are a counterintuitive phenonomon: the macroscopic appearance is expected to follow the symmetry of the unit cell. Growing such crystals in the lab is a great challenge, especially from organic molecules. We achieve here uniform metallo-organic crystals that exhibit single crystallinity with apparently distinct domains and chirality. The chirality is present at both the molecular and macroscopic levels, although only achiral elements are used. “Yo-yo”-like structures having opposite helical handedness evolve from initially formed seemingly achiral cylinders. This non-polyhedral morphology coexists with a continuous coordination network forming homochiral channels. This work sheds light on the enigmatic aspects of fascinating crystallization processes occurring in biological mineralization. Our findings open up opportunities to generate new porous and hierarchical chiral materials.
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spelling pubmed-69710822020-01-22 Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels di Gregorio, Maria Chiara Shimon, Linda J. W. Brumfeld, Vlad Houben, Lothar Lahav, Michal van der Boom, Milko E. Nat Commun Article Naturally occurring single crystals having a multidomain morphology are a counterintuitive phenonomon: the macroscopic appearance is expected to follow the symmetry of the unit cell. Growing such crystals in the lab is a great challenge, especially from organic molecules. We achieve here uniform metallo-organic crystals that exhibit single crystallinity with apparently distinct domains and chirality. The chirality is present at both the molecular and macroscopic levels, although only achiral elements are used. “Yo-yo”-like structures having opposite helical handedness evolve from initially formed seemingly achiral cylinders. This non-polyhedral morphology coexists with a continuous coordination network forming homochiral channels. This work sheds light on the enigmatic aspects of fascinating crystallization processes occurring in biological mineralization. Our findings open up opportunities to generate new porous and hierarchical chiral materials. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-01-20 /pmc/articles/PMC6971082/ /pubmed/31959750 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13925-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
di Gregorio, Maria Chiara
Shimon, Linda J. W.
Brumfeld, Vlad
Houben, Lothar
Lahav, Michal
van der Boom, Milko E.
Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title_full Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title_fullStr Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title_full_unstemmed Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title_short Emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
title_sort emergence of chirality and structural complexity in single crystals at the molecular and morphological levels
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6971082/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31959750
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13925-5
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