Abstract

Nature has long inspired chemists to replicate evolutionarily produced molecules. Arguably, the most important of these are the nucleic acids for their ability to store and transfer information by the means of duplex formation using Watson-Crick base pairing. Modified DNA strands have been prepared in which the phosphate ester synthetic unit, the recognition bases and the sugar backbones have all been replaced and these systems were found to form stable duplexes. We therefore propose that the exact structure of the aforementioned modules is not crucial for information manipulation through a sequence-selective duplication formation. This talk will describe a synthetic approach to a new class of polyester molecules, which were designed to form strong cooperative hydrogen bonds in non-polar organic solvents and hence form the basis for a new family of synthetic information oligomers.