Invited
Rationally designed supramolecular constructs for high performance applications

The development of supramolecular constructs to achieve a variety of high-performance applications is an area of active research, with particular interest in the use of cyclodextrin-based systems to bind small molecule guests. Such host-guest binding can be used for supramolecular catalysis, environmental remediation, and drug delivery, among a variety of other applications. Reported herein is the use of a variety of cyclodextrin constructs, including both monomeric cyclodextrins as well as higher-order derivatives, for new applications in the area of environmental remediation, with a particular focus on the use of cyclodextrin-functionalized paper in the development of highly selective and high performance filters. Efforts to use these filters for real-world applications and to simultaneously understand the underlying intermolecular interactions that enable such high performance will also be discussed.