On 21 February, AngewandteChemie International Edition (Impact Factor 12.959), one of the top international journals in the field of chemistry, received online an important progress made by our faculty member, Yuanli Chen, in the area of chiral controllable synthesis of polymers - " Handedness Inversion of Chiral 3-Aminophenol Formaldehyde Resin Nanotubes Mediated by Metal Coordination". This is the first time that our university has published a paper as the first corresponding unit in the German Journal of Applied Chemistry with the first corresponding author, Prof. Wang Dong and Dr. Chen Yuanli.

Helical inversion and conformational switching are common and crucial processes in biological self-assembly. Supramolecular nanostructures with tunable chiral orientation are of interest due to their excellent properties in areas such as chiral separation, asymmetric catalysis and chiral switching. Most of the reported research so far has focused on supramolecular soft gels or silica-based materials. These materials may not be suitable for certain fields where high mechanical properties, high electrical conductivity and fast heat transfer properties are required. Professor Wang Dong's group has developed a facile external metal ion-mediated chiral supramolecular co-templating method to prepare chiral 3-aminophenol formaldehyde resins in the desired conformation (right-handed helical, left-handed helical, straight and granular) in an enantiomerically pure template system. Further carbonisation leads to the corresponding chiral carbonaceous nanotubes. In addition, this metal ion-mediated supramolecular template method can also be used to prepare other chiral polymers containing amine groups (e.g. chiral poly(m-phenylenediamine), poly(m-phenylenediamine-formaldehyde) resins and polypyrrole).