Dendritic Amphiphiles as Macromolecular Mimetics of Cellular Constituents

One of the holy grails in chemistry is to reconstruct some of life’s functions within synthetic materials. In this contribution, we demonstrate that “simple” macromolecular architectures such as dendritic amphiphiles, Janus dendrimers, thermoresponsive and hybrid organic-inorganic (co)polymers enable to mimic some of the functions of proteins for biomineralization, natural bactericides, biological membranes or the stimuli-responsive cytoskeleton.