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Self-assembled vesicles are constructed based on supra-amphiphiles formed by cucurbit[8]uril and its two guest molecules. By modifying one of the guest molecules, an artificial nanohydrolase is constructed. An enhancement of catalytic activity for hydrolysis of 4-nitrophenyl acetate is observed, which is attributed to the enrichment effect of substrate around catalytic sites through the molecular recognition.

Electric heating can effectively control the winter haze and promote renewable energy accommodation, which has significant environmental and social benefits. However, due to the low investment enthusiasm of heating enterprises, the government provides huge subsidies to maintain the operation of electric heating. Based on this background, the environmental benefits of electric heating projects are quantified, and the economic and environmental benefits of urban wind power central heating projects are analyzed and evaluated from the perspective of the life cycle. Then, taking a wind power central heating project in northern China as an example, a more comprehensive, scientific, and accurate evaluation of the wind power central heating project has been carried out. The results show that the electric heating project has great environmental benefits, but the direct economic benefits are poor, which is mainly caused by its high initial investment and high electricity price. Finally, specific suggestions are put forward for the poor economic efficiency of wind power central heating projects. The research results can provide a reference for further perfecting the transaction mechanism of wind power centralized heating, formulating clean heating development policies, and promoting the development of clean heating in northern China.

In this work, we investigated the self-assembly of helical small molecules and found that the formed micrometer-sized supramolecular structures represented macroscopic chirality. Our observation will provide useful information for exploring the factors which are able to essentially control the chiral expression from molecular details to high-level chirality occurred in nature.

Enzyme, an efficient and sophisticated biocatalyst, evolves into unique biomacromolecule with three-dimensional structure consisting of a linear sequence of amino acids and plays a crucial role in catalyzing biologically chemical reactions with high efficiency and selectivity in living system. For understanding the relationships between the enzyme structures and functions, the enzymatically catalytic mechanism, as well as for the potential applications, various biomimetic catalysts have been constructed to simulate the catalytic behavior of native enzymes. According to the wide studies in this area, the substrate recognition, specifically supramolecular interactions, and the cooperativity between the catalytic sites and substrate-binding sites have been regarded as pivotal factors for designing an efficient artificial enzyme. Up to now, large numbers of artificial enzymes have been constructed on various different scaffolds ranging from small molecular compounds, polymers, biomacromolecules to supramolecular assemblies and nanomaterials. Although most of the artificial enzymes showed moderate catalytic activities, encouragingly, some of them exhibited exciting high efficiency and selectivity. Compared to other scaffolds, macromolecules with their own advantages can endow enzyme models with enriched catalytic sites as well as the easy-achieved cooperation of the catalysis and recognition. This review will give an overview of the construction of artificial enzymes using macromolecules as scaffolds in the past decades, wherein various macromolecules containing copolymers, dendrimers, hyperbranched polymers, polymer microgels, supramolecules, imprinted polymers and biomacromolecules have been developed as scaffolds of artificial enzymes.

The development of supramolecular chemistry has led to a shift in the research focus from the structural design of supramolecules to developing functional systems, such as supramolecular enzyme models. The supramolecular enzyme mimics can be readily constructed by self-assembly which is an efficient strategy for generating highly-ordered structures with complex and hierarchical architectures to mimic the biopolymers. The study of supramolecular enzyme mimics has implications for understanding both the structure–function relationships of natural enzymes and the thermodynamic mechanism during catalysis. Additionally, they are potentially useful in many important applications, e.g., medicinal application and industrial biocatalysts and so on. This review is aimed at giving a brief overview of the synthesis of supramolecular enzyme mimics and their functions.

A cyclodextrin-based artificial glutathione peroxidase (GPx) system, which was designed to carry single or double binding sites, has been investigated by observing the recognition features of these mimics. The GPx mimics exhibited high catalytic activities mainly due to the substrate recognition generated by hydrophobic driving force. The different recognition mechanisms led to quite different catalytic capacities. In contrast to single recognition, difunctional ones increased the substrate specificity remarkably. The recognition manners of enzyme mimics for substrates strongly depend on the comparative affinities and the concentrations of both substrates. In addition, the catalytic capacity of GPx mimic which contains a delicate binding site for product disulfide can be almost completely blocked via the self-produced inhibition. This work gives very worthful and important information on the understanding of native GPx.