Recently we have been concerned with a systematic and fundamental investigation into the effects of the linking group on the lyotropic and thermotropic properties of aliphatic substituted acyclic carbohydrate systems. For this purpose, we chose to study the selfassembling behaviour of alkyl substituted xylitols where the aliphatic chain was attached to the xylitol moiety via ether, ester and thioether linkages. We have extended this work and, in this current study, we report the effects on the self-assembling properties of sequentially moving the position of a dodecyl chain in acyclic x-O-dodecyl-D-xylitols. This work was used for a direct comparison with results reported on cyclic systems such as the dodecyl x-O-beta-Dglucopyranosides.