Research progress of redox-responsive supramolecular gel
Wen-Li Guan, Khalid Mohammed Adam, Min Qiu, You‐Ming Zhang, Hong Yao, Tai‐Bao Wei, Qi Lin
Abstract
In recent years, with the development of supramolecular chemistry, stimuli-responsive supramolecular gels have attracted more and more researchers’ interests. Among these gels, redox-responsive supramolecular gels have shown nice application prospects because of their reversible redox-responsiveness and electric field responsiveness. Owing to the existence of redox-reacting site, for example, radical, ferrocene, iron ions, ammonium salt, iodine molecules, π-π system and so on, the redox-responsive gel generally could change the gelator or the self-assembling state under the redox conditions. Therefore, the responsiveness of this kind of gel included phase changes, colour changes, fluorescence response or chiral structure changes induced by a redox reaction. The redox-responsive supramolecular gels, as a kind of smart material, could be used in storing energy, recognition, bioimaging, biomedical, fluorescent sensor, self-erasing ink, drug delivery, chiral catalyst, etc. In this review, we present the research progress of the redox-responsive supramolecular gel in recent years according to the gelator structures including alkyl chain-based redox gels, steroidal derivative-based redox gels, metal-organic compound-based redox gels, amino acid or peptide-based redox gels, macrocycle derivatives-based gels and π-gels. It is anticipated that more and more efficiency redox-responsive supramolecular gels with novel redox mechanisms and useful applications will be developed in the near future.