New speciality surfactants with natural structural motifs

Abstract

The interest in designing highly specialised synthetic surfactants incorporating natural structural motifs has increased remarkably during the last few years. The variety of naturally occurring structures used as parts of such “designer surfactants” ranges from simple amino acids and short peptides over carbohydrates to steroids. Surely, one of the most prominent examples in this respect and probably the breakthrough for tailor-made surfactants in highly specialised applications was the use of a surfactant for the first successful crystallisation of a membrane protein, a great feat for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in the year 1988. Moreover, the ability of certain specialised surfactants to accelerate the transport of genetic material or drugs through biological membranes is widely taken advantage of in biotechnology and pharmacy. The most important applications for surfactants, however, are related to their self-organisation in solution. Self-organisation leads to the formation of micelles, liposomes, lyotropic liquid crystalline phases, and microemulsions. These self-organised structures are used for solubilisation, transport, and separation processes, as templates for nanoparticles, as models for biomembranes, and as reaction media, to mention just a few. In all these applications surfactants designed on the basis of natural compounds are either desirable or even indispensable. An overview of some of our recent synthetic work in the field of “new speciality surfactants with natural structural motifs”, partly taking advantage of the “chiral pool”, will be given and future perspectives will be discussed.