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Bio-organic adaptive photonic crystals enable supramolecular solvatochromism

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Abstract

Photonic crystals (PCs) exhibit promising structural coloration properties and possess extensive application prospects in diverse optical fields. However, state-of-the-art inorganic or polymeric PCs show limited adaptivity as their configurations are fixed once formed. Herein, bio-organic adaptive PCs are fabricated via drop-casting of amphiphilic guanine-based peptide nucleic acid self-assembled microspheres. The high formation activation energy of up to 81.8 kJ·mol−1 suggests that the self-assembly step dominates the entire process. Therefore, the configurations along with the structural coloration of the supramolecular PCs are sensitive to self-assembly influencing parameters, showing temperature-encoded structural color evolution and solvent polarity-dependent solvatochromism. Our findings demonstrate that the supramolecular PCs are adaptive, thus showing promising potential for detection of organic solvents of different polarities in a visual and real-time manner for environmental protection or optical applications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2022YFE0100800) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52175551). The authors thank the members of the laboratories for helpful discussions.

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  1. Jiahao Zhang and Yan Zhang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Jiahao Zhang, Yancheng Wang, Deqing Mei & Kai Tao

  2. Zhejiang-Israel Joint Laboratory of Self-Assembling Functional Materials, Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Centre, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 311200, China

    Jiahao Zhang, Yan Zhang & Kai Tao

  3. Key Laboratory of Advanced Manufacturing Technology of Zhejiang Province, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Jiahao Zhang, Yancheng Wang, Deqing Mei & Kai Tao

  4. The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 6997801, Israel

    Sigal Rencus-Lazar & Ehud Gazit

  5. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 6997801, Israel

    Ehud Gazit

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  1. Jiahao Zhang
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Correspondence to Ehud Gazit or Kai Tao.

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Zhang, J., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Bio-organic adaptive photonic crystals enable supramolecular solvatochromism. Nano Res. 16, 12092–12097 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5331-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5331-1

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