Janus Drug Delivery Vehicle: Efficient drug delivery vehicles need to be produced in a limited size range and with uniform size distribution. The self-assembly of traditional small-molecule and polymeric amphiphiles has led to the production of micelles, liposomes, polymeric micelles, and polymersomes for use in drug delivery applications. Now, Percec et al. (p. 1009 ) describe the self-assembly of Janus-type (i.e., two-headed) dendrimers to produce monodisperse supramolecular constructs, termed “dendrimersomes,” and other complex architectures. The structures, which showed long-term stability as well as very narrow size distributions, were easily produced by the injection of an ethanolic solution of the dendrimer into water. The dendrimersomes could be loaded with the anticancer drug doxorubicin and exhibited controlled drug release with changing pH.

Over the last decade, DNA nanotechnology has spawned a broad variety of functional nanostructures tailored toward the enabled state at which applications are coming increasingly in view. One of the branches of these applications is in synthetic biology, where the intrinsic programmability of the DNA nanostructures may pave the way for smart task-specific molecular robotics. In brief, the synthesis of the user-defined artificial DNA nano-objects is based on employing DNA molecules with custom lengths and sequences as building materials that predictably assemble together by obeying Watson-Crick base pairing rules. The general workflow of creating DNA nanoshapes is getting more and more straightforward, and some objects can be designed automatically from the top down. The versatile DNA nano-objects can serve as synthetic tools at the interface with biology, for example in therapeutics and diagnostics as dynamic logic-gated nanopills, light-, pH- and thermally driven devices. Such diverse apparatuses can also serve as optical polarizers, sensors and capsules, autonomous cargo-sorting robots, rotary machines, precision measurement tools as well as electric and magnetic-field directed robotic arms. In this review, we summarize the recent progress in robotic DNA nanostructures, mechanics and their various implementations.

The self-assembly of the dendritic dipeptides (4-3,4-3,5)nG2-CH₂-Boc-l-Tyr-l-Ala-OMe and their achiral dendritic alcohol (4-3,4-3,5)nG2-CH₂OH precursors, both with n = 1–16, where n represents the number of methylenic units in the alkyl groups of the dendron, are reported. All chiral dendritic dipeptides and achiral dendritic alcohols self-assemble into helical porous columns that are stable in both solution and solid state. The pore diameter (D_pore) of the columns self-assembled from dendritic dipeptides is ≈10 Å larger than that of structures assembled from dendritic alcohols. The increase of the D_pore at the transition from dendritic alcohol to dendritic dipeptide is accompanied by a decreased solid angle of the building block. This trend is in agreement with previous pore size-solid angle dependences observed with different protective groups of the dipeptide and primary structures of the dendron. However, within the series of dendritic alcohols and dendritic dipeptides with various n, the D_pore increases when the solid angle increases. The results of these investigations together with those of previous studies on the role of dipeptide stereochemistry and protective groups on this self-assembly process provide the molecular principles required to program the construction of supramolecular helical pores with diameter controlled at the Å level from a single dendritic dipeptide architecture. These principles are expected to be valid for libraries of dendritic dipeptides based on dendrons and dipeptides with various primary structures.