Controlled Molecular Folding for Adaptive Chirality: From Stimuli Responsiveness to Structural Adaptability
The controlled regulation of molecular folding provides a fundamental pathway for constructing adaptive chiral materials with tunable optical and structural properties. This review summarizes recent progress in folding-mediated chirality control across four interrelated domains: stimuli-responsive regulation, host-guest and coordination interactions, halogen-bond driven modulation, and structural adaptability. Stimuli such as solvent polarity, temperature, pH, and light can reversibly reshape intramolecular hydrogen-bond networks to trigger chiroptical switching. Host-guest and coordination assemblies further enable cooperative chirality transfer through multicomponent interactions, while halogen bonding offers directional and programmable control over molecular helicity. Finally, intrinsic structural adaptability—integrating ferrocenyl frameworks, peptide folding, and diastereomeric design—demonstrates that molecular architecture itself can encode responsive behavior. By comparing these diverse yet convergent strategies, this review highlights the underlying principles of folding-regulated chirality and outlines future directions toward intelligent, multifunctional, and hierarchically organized chiral systems.