An interview with Brigitte Jamart-Grégoire from the University of Nancy, France.

How did you get interested in this research project? 

The discovery of the first organogel was fortuitous as we were preparing some starting materials for new pseudopeptides. Nevertheless, we decided to explore the physical and chemical properties of this organogel with the goal to understand the role of different parameters on the capabilities of organogelators to gelify solvents.

What is the most important result in the paper? 

The importance of the results we presented here is twofold. Firstly, we have shown that it is possible to control the chirality of a supramolecular building block simply by using different concentrations of nonchiral solvent mixtures. Secondly, the results obtained in fluorescence assays (Figure 1) attest that the nature of the substituent plays a key role on the aggregation of the organogelator molecules in the supramolecular building block.

Figure 1. In situ fluorescence image of organogelator in toluene (conc. 0.25 wt %) showing a fibrillar network arrangement. 

What are the implications of the results you present in this paper?   

From a fundamental point of view, the results published in this article shed some light on the understanding of gelation phenomena, and more precisely on the role of solvents. The possibility to control chirality will be of interest in the preparation of oxide tubes. Moreover, we have also started some experiments in order to obtain aerogels from this organogel; our preliminary results are very encouraging!