Assembly and Chiral Memory Effect of Dynamic Macroscopic Supramolecular Helices.

Macroscopic enantiomerically pure helical supramolecular fibers are bottom-up assembled in aqueous media from a chiral pi-electron donor template and an achiral pi-electron acceptor. The helices can be assembled to the sub-millimeter scale with controlled handedness. These dynamic supramolecular architectures allow for a quantitative exchange of the chiral donor template with achiral analogues. During this process, a chiral memory effect was observed, affording enantiomerically pure helices composed entirely of achiral components.