Abstract
At the molecular level, translation refers to the production of a new entity according to a template that has a different chemical composition. In this way, chemical information may be translated from one molecule to another. The process is useful to synthesize structures and thus functions that might be difficult to create otherwise, and it reaches exquisite levels of efficiency in biological systems, as illustrated by protein expression from mRNA templates1,2 or by the assembly of the tobacco mosaic virus capsid protein according to the length of its RNA3. In synthetic systems, examples of template-directed syntheses are numerous4,5,6, but general and versatile schemes in which a non-natural sequence actually encodes the information necessary to produce a different sequence are few and far from being optimized7,8,9,10. Here we show a high-fidelity enzyme-free translation of long rod-like alkylcarbamate oligomers into well-defined sequences of stacked helical aromatic oligoamides. The features present in the rods, which include the number and distance between carbamate functions and stereogenic centres, template the self-assembly of complementary stacks of helices that each have a defined right (P) or left (M) handedness, length and single or double helicity. This process enables the production of very large (>20 kDa) abiotic artificial folded architectures (foldamers11) that may, for example, serve as scaffolds to organize appended functional features at positions in space defined with atomic precision across nanometric distances.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Conseil Régional d'Aquitaine, the China Scholarship Council and the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (Grant Agreement No. ERC-2012-AdG-320892). The authors thank Christoph Mueller-Dieckmann (ESRF beamline ID29) for providing beamtime and help during the data collection.
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Q.G. and X.W synthesised all the new compounds and contributed equally to this work. Q.G. and X.W. carried out solution studies. B.K. collected X-ray data and solved the crystal structures. F.R. carried out ion mobility mass spectrometry measurements. I.H. and Y.F. designed the study. I.H. and Y.F. wrote the manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Gan, Q., Wang, X., Kauffmann, B. et al. Translation of rod-like template sequences into homochiral assemblies of stacked helical oligomers. Nature Nanotech 12, 447–452 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.15
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