Julius Rebek - Self Assembly

Self Assembly

Through collaboration with Javier de Mendoza in 1993, Rebek managed to create a self-assembling capsule. These form reversibly by completely surrounding small molecule targets and have become a versatile tool of modern physical organic chemistry. They exist in solution at equilibrium and under ambient conditions. They act as nanometric reaction chambers, as means to stabilize reagents, as sources of “complexes within complexes” and as spaces where new forms of stereochemistry have been created. They also inspired encapsulation in other research groups that use metal-ligand interactions for self-assembly. A cylindrical capsule of nanometric dimensions is shown above; it selects congruent guests singly or pairwise when the space inside is appropriately filled.

Richard Dawkins writes about autocatalysis as a potential explanation for abiogenesis in his 2004 book The Ancestor's Tale. He cites experiments performed by Julius Rebek and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute in California in which they combined amino adenosine and pentafluorophenyl ester with the autocatalyst amino adenosine triacid ester (AATE). One system from the experiment contained variants of AATE which catalysed the synthesis of themselves. This experiment demonstrated the possibility that autocatalysts could exhibit competition within a population of entities with heredity, which could be interpreted as a rudimentary form of natural selection.