The use of circular dichroism spectroscopy for studying the chiral molecular self-assembly: an overview.

Self-assembly plays an important role in the formation of many chiral biological structures and in the preparation of chiral functional materials. Therefore the control of chirality in synthetic or biological self-assembled systems is important either for the comprehension of recognition phenomena or to obtain materials with predictable and controllable properties. Circular dichroism was developed to study molecular chirality, however, because of its outstanding sensitivity to chiral perturbations of the system under investigation; it has been extended more recently to supramolecular chemistry. In particular, self-assembly processes leading to the formation of chiral supramolecular architectures (and eventually to gels or liquid crystal phases) can be monitored by CD. Furthermore, CD spectroscopy often allows one to obtain structural information on the assembled structures. This review deals with representative contributions to the study of supramolecular chirality by means of circular dichroism. (c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.