Self-assembly of rod-coil molecules is an important research interest in supramolecular materials science realms. Compared to the traditional flexible coil-coil and rod-coil block polymers, rod-coil molecules exhibit very different phase behavior, self-assembling characters and microstructures. And correlative investigations showed that the rod-coil molecules could come into being several nanostructures, such as mushroom-like nature, smectic phase, cubic phase, hexagonal columnar phase, and so on. The studies confirmed that the intermolecular H-bonding interaction was the major driving force for self-assembly of the rod-coil molecules during liquid crystallization and/or gelling. This review describes the self-assembly of rod-coil molecules reported from the recent literature.

Key words: H-bonding, self-assembly, rod-coil molecule