Selected Publications
- I. Maity, N. Wagner, R. Mukherjee, D. Dev, E. Peacock-Lopez, R. Cohen-Luria and G. Ashkenasy*, A Chemically Fueled Non-Enzymatic Bistable Network. Nat Commun. 2019, 10, 4636.
- A. K. Das,* I. Maity, H. S. Parmar, T. O. McDonald and M. Konda, Lipase catalyzed dissipative self-assembly of a thixotropic peptide bolaamphiphile hydrogel for human umbilical cord stem cells proliferation. Biomacromolecule, 2015, 16, 1157.
- I. Maity, H. S. Parmar, D. B. Rasale and A. K. Das*, Self-programmed nanovesicle to nanofiber transformation of a dipeptide appended bolaamphiphile and its dose dependent cytotoxic behavior. J. Mater. Chem. B, 2014, 2, 527
- D. B. Rasale, I. Maity and A. K Das *, In situ generation of redox active peptides driven by selenoester mediated native chemical ligation. Chem. Commun., 2014, 50, 11397
- I. Maity, D. B. Rasale and A. K. Das*, Sonication induced peptide-appended bolaamphiphile hydrogels for in situ generation and catalytic activity of Pt nanoparticles. Soft Matter, 2012, 8, 5301 (Top 10 most-read Soft Matter articles in April 2012.)
FRIAS Project
Molecular Robotics to Actuate Mesoscopic and Macroscopic Functions
One of the central challenges is to amplify the function of molecular machines into mesoscopic and macroscopic dimension to create work. At best this requires organizing the machines so as to be able to harness their motion with a directionality. In this context, molecular self-assembly is one of the key steps.Many natural self-assembly processes are energetically up-hill whereas, synthetic self-assembly processes are thermodynamically controlled and down-hill. Therefore, one of the present challenges in supramolecular chemistry is to achieve full control over the assembly behaviour also out of equilibrium – in particular because new functions can be reached. To this point, the design of autonomous system is emerging as an advanced functionality. This proposal represents the integration of molecular robots and suggests the autonomous molecular machine directed dissipative self-assembly and, thereby taking the next steps to bring these materials out of equilibrium and generate new functionalities. Also, a crucial step towards understanding the amplification of molecular robotic actions at macroscopic regime, to mimic the muscle-like materials using bottom-up approaches is proposed. The combination of self-assembly and molecular machines will play a significant role towards future applications in soft robotics, catalysis, medicinal science, and nanotechnology. Therefore, I believe that this can offer promising aspects in the development of next generation molecular materials.