Mechanochemical reactivity inhibited, prohibited and reversed by liquid additives: examples from crystal-form screens.

We demonstrate that liquid additives can exert inhibitive or prohibitive effects on the mechanochemical formation of multi-component molecular crystals, and report that certain additives unexpectedly prompt the dismantling of such solids into physical mixtures of their constituents. Computational methods were employed in an attempt to identify possible reasons for these previously unrecognised effects of liquid additives on mechanochemical transformations.

Ostwald's rule of stages governs structural transitions and morphology of dipeptide supramolecular polymers.

The self-assembly of molecular building blocks into nano- and micro-scale supramolecular architectures has opened up new frontiers in polymer science. Such supramolecular species not only possess a rich set of dynamic features as a consequence of the non-covalent nature of their core interactions, but also afford unique structural characteristics. Although much is now known about the manner in which such structures adopt their morphologies and size distributions in response to external stimuli, the kinetic and thermodynamic driving forces that lead to their transformation from soluble monomeric species into ordered supramolecular entities have remained elusive.