Just tossing mortar and bricks together won’t yield a tidy structure, but chemists must often resort to similar measures when building molecules the size of proteins, the workhorses of cells. Now researchers have developed a cleaner strategy for constructing such compounds. By employing one kind of molecule as a template, scientists can string together small biologically important molecules into larger ringed structures with unprecedented precision and no mess, a team reports in the Jan. 6 Nature.
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The new technique hits a previously inaccessible sweet spot, yielding hefty molecules that approach the size of proteins, the macromolecules that are the movers and shakers of the cellular world. The method could become a broadly used tool for building big molecular structures, including more templates to build even larger compounds. And because the rings are built from strands of compounds of the same class as the pigment chlorophyll, the large loops may exhibit unusual electrical properties and could help researchers better understand how the pigments that drive photosynthesis harvest light.
“We’d like to think the use would be very general — there’s no reason it shouldn’t be,” says chemist Harry Anderson of the University of Oxford in England, who led the new work. “People often want to make objects that are a particular size and shape.”