Dynamic combinatorial chemistry as a tool for the design of functional materials and devices.

This tutorial review presents emerging lines of investigations directed towards the development of dynamic combinatorial materials and devices. These can be defined as multi-component chemical systems which, thanks to the reversibility of their interconnections within networks of competing reactions, and thanks to their sensitivity to environmental parameters, aim at performing modular functional tasks by responding to external stimuli. The behaviour of such dynamic materials is by essence more complex than the one produced by their static or single-component counterparts and as such, they hold higher potentialities in terms of information processing and functionality tuning. Key examples are selected here to illustrate the variety of their chemical nature and physical properties which can be implemented for the fabrication of devices as diverse as sensors, ion channels, self-healable materials, mesophases for the controlled release of bioactive compounds, or dynamic functional nanostructures. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2012