Smart molecules: Serve today and make the future

Abstract

Smart molecules are advancing rapidly in life and health care. More recently, there has been a growing interest in “smart” molecules for a range of biomedical applications including precise drug delivery, diagnostics, tissue engineering and biomedical devices based on the communications and interactions between molecules and cells. As molecular machines, smart molecules can be controlled by external stimuli. Those features, combined with remarkable architectural versatility, make molecular machines uniquely powerful in a wide range of future technologies, from working as tiny robots for disease detection or drug delivery of microprocessors to specific sites. Smart molecules also play key roles in clean energy science and technology. Smart molecule-based artificial photosynthesis, integrated light-harvesting antennae (photosensitizer), charge separation systems, and catalysts for water oxidation or hydrogen production based on covalently linked subunits are being elaborately designed and improved. In another respect, rapid progress in the development of organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology, numerous OPV materials including smart molecules have come to the fore in achieving outstanding power conversion efficiency and breaking 20% efficiency barrier in the single junction OPV devices. Innovative photovoltaic materials, especially molecular donors and acceptors, have become the dominant factor for improved device performance. Smart molecules are widely used in digital displays. Now, fluorescent and phosphorescent organic dyes play an essential role in the creation of new “smart” molecular displays. Fragments and functional groups capable of free rotation around single bonds can significantly change the fluorescent and phosphorescent organic dye's electronic structure under analyte effects, phase state transitions, or changes in temperature, pressure, and media polarity. Effects of molecular packing of fluorescent and organic dyes are successfully used in developing mechano-, piezo-, and thermo-fluorochromes materials in the optical recording of information, sensors, security items, memory elements, and organic light-emitting diodes technologies. As catalysis, smart molecules could not only promote chemical transformations including small organic molecules, molecular complexes, proteins and nucleic acids, but also act as reversible photoswitches for enantiospecific transformation and reversible photo-superstructures, digital photoprogramming, and tunable circularly polarized luminescence with a high dissymmetry factor. Recent years have witnessed the development of smart materials or stimuli-responsive materials, which can sense the subtle variation in the environment and provide intrinsic property changes including shape, color, conductivity, light transmittance etc. Smart materials-based actuators and robots are expected to be used in smart mechanical outputs, wearable and portable devices, bio-inspired robots and surface haptics. Exploring these materials to construct “smart” mixed reality equipment will reduce the size and the weight of current devices as well as simplify the programming design to current control systems, offering better user experience. Smart Molecules are copublished by Wiley and Dalian University of Technology and it aims to publish experimental and theoretical approaches dealing with molecules based functional systems that show a response to external stimuli, such as light, heat, electric field, magnetic field, sound, guest molecules, et al. It includes but not limited to the following topics: external stimuli induced cis-trans, open-close ring structural transformation, electric configuration interconversion such as spin transition and electron transfer detecting, sensing, self-healing functions of molecules based functional systems, molecular devices and machine, micro and nano-systems, key materials, mechanistic study, molecular design work, function tuning, smart manufacturing, et al. Smart Molecules a