The preparations and physical properties of one-dimensional nanostructures such as nanowires, nanorods, nanotubes and nanochains have attracted considerable attentions over past years. Among all these 1D nanomaterials, the synthesis of nanotubes however remains challenging.

Recently, Prof. Gao and his colleague from the CAS Key Laboratory of Colloid, Interface Science and Chemical Thermodynamics have developed a novel synthetic route for producing superlong CdTe nanotubes. They have demonstrated that isolated 1-D nanostructures with controllable diameters and morphologies can be formed by Cd²⁺ ions and thioglycolic acid complexes (Cd-TGA) and further proven that the resultant 1-D Cd-TGA nanowires are suitable sacrificial templates for synthesizing super-long CdTe nanotubes. The key point for preparing the isolated 1-D metal driven nanowires is the non-stoichemetric addtions of metal ions and thiolic ligands. Moreover, the diameter tunability of the resultant nanotubes mediated by polyacrylic acid (PAA) relies on the weak inter-molecular interactions between PAA and Cd-TGA polymer chains. To put the current results in large perspective, many types of supramolecular structures, formed by metal coordination compounds, could be tailored in similar way and form low dimensional sacrificial precursors for hollow inorganic nano-structures. This work has recently been published as a VIP paper in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (2006, 45, 6462).