English

Mastering energy landscapes via liquid liquid phase separation to program active supramolecular coassembly from the nano to macro scale

Soft Condensed Matter 2025-10-28 v1 Materials Science Chemical Physics

Abstract

The energy landscape dictates pathways and outcomes in supramolecular selfassembly, yet harnessing it from the nano to the macro scales remains a major challenge. Here, we demonstrate liquid liquid phase separation (LLPS) as a powerful tool to navigate and engineer the energy landscapes of coassembly systems comprising disordered proteins and peptides. We quantitatively map the energy barriers and transition states governing structural transitions, enabling predictive on off control of assembly and hierarchical order from nano to macro scales. By integrating supramolecular biofabrication, we achieve spatially organized architectures with life like non equilibrium behaviour. Crucially, assembly stability and scalable selfsorting are shown to depend on accessing minimum energy states, regardless of whether the co assembled structures are disordered or ordered. This work establishes energy landscape mediation via LLPS as a general framework for designing lifelike, hierarchically structured materials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.23017,
  title  = {Mastering energy landscapes via liquid liquid phase separation to program active supramolecular coassembly from the nano to macro scale},
  author = {Yuanhao Wu and Alexander van Teijlingen and Julie Watts and Zhiquan Yu and Shanshan Su and Jose Carlos RodriguezCabello and Lihi Abramovich and Tell Tuttle and Alvaro Mata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.23017},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

20pages,6figrues