Related papers: Rapid Spontaneous Assembly of Single Component Lip…
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…
Ethanol injection and variations of it are a class of methods where two miscible phases---one of which contains dissolved lipids---are mixed together leading to the self-assembly of lipid molecules to form liposomes. This method has been…
Self-assembly is a ubiquitous process in synthetic and biological systems, broadly defined as the spontaneous organization of multiple subunits (e.g. macromolecules, particles) into ordered multi-unit structures. The vast majority of…
We consider a lattice model for amphiphiles in a solvent with molecules chemically similar to one part of the amphiphilic molecule. The dependence of the interaction potential on orientation of the amphiphilic molecules is taken into…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
Amphiphilic polymers in aqueous solutions can self-assemble to form bilayer membranes, and their elastic properties can be captured by the well-known Helfrich model involving several elastic constants. In this paper, we employ the…
Building structures with hierarchical order through the self-assembly of smaller blocks is not only a prerogative of nature, but also a strategy to design artificial materials with tailored functions. We explore in simulation the…
The use of reduced models for investigating the self-assembly dynamics underlying protein shell formation in spherical viruses is described. The spontaneous self-assembly of these polyhedral, supramolecular structures, in which icosahedral…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
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…
Self-assembly kinetics is usually described by approaches which assume that the shape of the aggregates has a definite form (e.g., spherical, cylindrical, cubic, etc), however that is unlikely to be the case in many finite-sized…
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 show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…
Polypeptides can self-assemble into hierarchically organized fibrils consisting of a stack of individually folded polypeptides driven together by hydrophobic interaction. Using a coarse grained model, we systematically studied this…
A model for a monolayer of two types of particles spontaneously forming ordered patterns is studied by a mesoscopic theory and by MC simulations. We assume hard-cores of the same size for both components, short-range attraction long-range…
Controlled micro- to meso-scale porosity is a common materials design goal with possible applications ranging from molecular gas adsorption to particle size selective permeability or solubility. Here, we use inverse methods of statistical…
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 contrast to extensively studied defects in traditional materials, we report here for the first time a systematic investigation of the formation mechanism of intrinsic defects in self-assembled peptide nanostructures. The Monte Carlo…
The cytoplasm is a heterogeneous mixture containing many types of proteins that self-assemble into a wide variety of complexes. The accuracy and speed of cytoplasmic self-assembly is astonishing because it involves the correct…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…