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H-Bonded Duplexes based on a Phenylacetylene Backbone

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Swain, Jonathan 
Hunter, CA 

Abstract

Complementary phenylacetylene oligomers equipped with phenol and phosphine oxide recognition sites form stable multiply H-bonded duplexes in toluene solution. Oligomers were prepared by Sonogashira coupling of diiodobenzene and bis-acetylene building blocks in the presence of mono-acetylene chain terminators. The product mixtures were separated by reverse phase preparative high-pressure liquid chromatography to give a series of pure oligomers up to seven recognition units in length. Duplex formation between length complemen-tary homo-oligomers was demonstrated by 31P NMR denaturation experiments using dimethyl sulfoxide as a competing H-bond accep-tor. The denaturation experiments were used to determine the association constants for duplex formation, which increase by nearly two orders of magnitude for every phenol-phosphine oxide base-pair added. These experiments show that the phenylacetylene backbone supports formation of extended duplexes with multiple cooperative intermolecular H-bonding interactions, and together with previous studies on the mixed sequence phenylacetylene 2-mer, suggest that this supramolecular architecture is a promising candidate for the de-velopment of synthetic information molecules that parallel the properties of nucleic acids.

Description

Keywords

0303 Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry

Journal Title

Journal of the American Chemical Society

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1520-5126
1520-5126

Volume Title

140

Publisher

American Chemical Society (ACS)
Sponsorship
European Research Council (320539)
EPSRC (EP/J008044/4)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/J008044/2), European Research Council (ERC-2012-AdG 320539-duplex)