Facile Construction of Dendritic Amphiphiles with Aggregation-Induced Emission Characteristics for Supramolecular Self-Assembly

Self-assembly of dendritic amphiphiles has attracted great attention due to their various applications in fundamental and practical areas. However, it still remains a great challenge to prepare dendritic amphiphiles with a facile protocol because of their complex molecular structures and tedious synthesis process. Herein, we develop a simple and straightforward strategy to construct dendritic amphiphiles with aggregation-induced emission characteristics by using tetraphenylethene derivatives as the bridge fragment. These dendritic amphiphiles can self-assemble into well-defined structures, and their supramolecular topological structures can be further transformed from spheres into other morphological structures, such as tubules and nanofibers, showing the diversiform self-assembly manipulated by the solvent effect. Furthermore, the supramolecular materials well performed as fluorescent photosensitizers for fluorescence image-guided photodynamic cancer therapy, ascribing to the high-performance fluorescence emission, good biocompatibility, and high electron donor–acceptor strength characteristics. This work provides a new way to construct functional dendritic amphiphiles and greatly broadens their applications in supramolecular chemistry and material science.