Highly read on www.acs.org in February

Extremely long molecular chains can self-assemble from two nucleobase-like chemicals, report Nicholas Hud at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his co-workers.

The team showed that three of each of the monomers cyanuric acid and a pyrimidine derivative can form a rosette structure. When combined in water, the rosettes stacked themselves into long chains that were more than 1 micrometre in length, the longest self-assembling water-soluble structures ever made from such small molecules. Hydrogen bonding and stacking between the monomers was similar to that seen between individual nucleobases in DNA and RNA. The work provides insight into how a self-assembling system might have existed in a prebiotic world.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 135, 2447–2450 (2013)