Supramolecular zippers elicit interbilayer adhesion of membranes producing cell death.

Background: The fluorescent dye 10-N-nonyl acridine orange (NAO) is widely used as a mitochondrial marker. NAO was reported to have cytotoxic effects in cultured eukaryotic cells when incubated at high concentrations. Although the biochemical response of NAO-induced toxicity has been well identified, the underlying molecular mechanism has not yet been explored in detail.

Unveiling the Role of Macrodipolar Interactions in the Properties of Self-Assembled Supramolecular Materials.

Self-assembling of supramolecules composed of benzene and cyclohexane tricarboxamide derivatives can form highly organized 1 D fibers exhibiting macrodipoles. The way fibers pack in the condensed phase governs the final properties of the supramolecular material, in which macrodipoles can be oriented parallel or antiparallel to each other, and their magnitude can be tuned by additional intra-columnar dipole stabilization. X-ray structural elucidation of these materials remains a real challenge due to the difficulty in growing single crystals.

In-Depth Insights into the Key Steps of Delamination of Charged 2D Nanomaterials.

Delamination is a key step to obtain individual layers from inorganic layered materials needed for fundamental studies and applications. For layered van der Waals materials such as graphene, the adhesion forces are small, allowing for mechanical exfoliation, whereas for ionic layered materials such as layered silicates, the energy to separate adjacent layers is considerably higher. Quite counterintuitively, we show for a synthetic layered silicate (Na-hectorite) that a scalable and quantitative delamination by simple hydration is possible for high and homogeneous charge density, even for aspect ratios as large as 20000.