Related papers: Role of reversibility in viral capsid growth: A pa…
Self-organized complex structures in nature, e.g. viral capsids, hierarchical biopolymers, and bacterial flagella, offer efficiency, adaptability, robustness, and multi-functionality. Can we program the self-assembly of three-dimensional…
The distribution of inequivalent geometries occurring during self-assembly of the major capsid protein in thermodynamic equilibrium is determined based on a master equation approach. These results are implemented to characterize the…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
Magnetic nanoparticles in a colloidal solution self-assemble in various aligned structures, which has a profound influence on the flow behavior. However, the precise role of the microstructure in the development of the rheological response…
The interaction between a flexible polymer in good solvent and smaller associating solute molecules such as amphiphiles (surfactants) is considered theoretically. Attractive correlations, induced in the polymer because of the interaction,…
We systematically study the design of simple patchy sphere models that reversibly self-assemble into monodisperse icosahedral clusters. We find that the optimal patch width is a compromise between structural specificity (the patches must be…
We report numerical investigations of a three-dimensional model of diffusive growth of fine particles, the internal structure of which corresponds to different crystal lattices. A growing cluster (particle) is immersed in, and exchanges…
We study the interplay between phase separation and self-assembly in chains, rings and branched structures in a model of particles with dissimilar patches. We extend Wertheim's first order perturbation theory to include the effects of ring…
The self-assembly of anisotropic building blocks into complex spatial architectures is an important design strategy in material science but the mechanisms by which the anisotropic interactions influence the early-stage growth and formation…
Self-assembly is the mechanism that controls the formation of well defined structures from disordered pre-existing parts. Despite the importance of self-assembly as a manufacturing method and the increasingly large number of experimental…
Both biological and artificial self-assembly processes can take place by a range of different schemes, from the successive addition of identical building blocks, to hierarchical sequences of intermediates, all the way to the fully…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Self-assembly is a key process in living systems - from the microscopic biological level (e.g. assembly of proteins into fibrils within biomolecular condensates in a human cell) through to the macroscopic societal level (e.g. assembly of…
Understanding the complex self-assembly of biomacromolecules is a major outstanding question. Microtubules are one example of a biopolymer that possesses characteristics quite distinct from standard synthetic polymers that are derived from…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
We report small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments on aqueous dispersions of colloidal silica with a broad monomodal size distribution (polydispersity 18%, size 8 nm). Over a range of volume fractions the silica particles segregate…
An example of a discrete pregeometry on a microscopic scale is introduced. The model is a directed dyadic acyclic graph. This is the particular case of a causal set. The particles in this model must be self-organized repetitive structures.…
The desire to create cell-like models for fundamental science and applications has spurred extensive effort towards creating giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs). However, a route to selectively self-assemble GUVs in bulk has remained elusive.…
Self-assembly plays an essential role in many natural processes, involving the formation and evolution of living or non-living structures, and shows potential applications in many emerging domains. In existing research and practice, there…
In this work we study how a viral capsid can change conformation using techniques of Large Deviations Theory for stochastic differential equations. The viral capsid is a model of a complex system in which many units - the proteins forming…