MELDOLA LECTURE - THE ROLE OF AROMATIC INTERACTIONS IN MOLECULAR RECOGNITION

Studies of pi-pi interactions in covalently linked porphyrin dimers have been used to develop a simple electrostatic model for understanding and computing non-covalent interactions between aromatic molecules. The model has been tested on experimental data from protein X-ray crystal structures and by the successful design and synthesis of a molecular receptor for p-benzoquinone. Applications of the model to sequence-dependent DNA structure show that ideas derived from simple chemical systems can be useful for understanding more complex molecular assemblies.