Related papers: Analyzing mechanisms and microscopic reversibility…
Self-assembly processes are widespread in nature, and lie at the heart of many biological and physical phenomena. The characteristics of self-assembly building blocks determine the structures that they form. Two crucial properties are the…
Self-assembly at submicroscopic scales is an important but little understood phenomenon. A prominent example is virus capsid growth, whose underlying behavior can be modeled using simple particles that assemble into polyhedral shells.…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
The impact of confinement on self-assembly of particles interacting with short-range attraction and long-range repulsion (SALR) potential is studied for thermodynamic states corresponding to local ordering of clusters or layers in the bulk.…
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 living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
We study two mechanisms for the formation of protein patterns near membranes of living cells by mathematical modelling. Self-assembly of protein domains by electrostatic lipid-protein interactions is contrasted with self-organization due to…
One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…
We introduce a simple "patchy particle" model to study the thermodynamics and dynamics of self-assembly of homomeric protein complexes. Our calculations allow us to rationalize recent results for dihedral complexes. Namely, why evolution of…
In the self-assembly process which drives the formation of cellular membranes, micelles, and capsids, a collection of separated subunits spontaneously binds together to form functional and more ordered structures. In this work, we study the…
Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
We use neuroevolutionary learning to identify time-dependent protocols for low-dissipation self-assembly in a model of generic active particles with interactions. When the time allotted for assembly is sufficiently long, low-dissipation…
A crystal lattice, when confined to the surface of a cylinder, must have a periodic structure that is commensurate with the cylinder circumference. This constraint can frustrate the system, leading to oblique crystal lattices or to…
Self-assembly and force generation are two central processes in biological systems that usually are considered in separation. However, the signals that activate non-muscle myosin II molecular motors simultaneously lead to self-assembly into…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
Molecular self-assembly on surfaces constitutes a powerful method for creating tailor-made surface structures with dedicated functionalities. Varying the intermolecular interactions allows for tuning the resulting molecular structures in a…
The inverse problem of designing component interactions to target emergent structure is fundamental to numerous applications in biotechnology, materials science, and statistical physics. Equally important is the inverse problem of designing…
The design space for a self-assembled multicomponent objects ranges from a solution in which every building block is unique to one with the minimum number of distinct building blocks that unambiguously define the target structure. Using a…
The formation of a viral capsid -- the highly-ordered protein shell that surrounds the genome of a virus -- is the canonical example of self-assembly. The capsids of many positive-sense RNA viruses spontaneously assemble from in vitro…