Related papers: Hierarchical assembly may be a way to make large i…
Understanding how highly symmetric, robust, monodisperse protein cages self-assemble can have major applications in various areas of bio-nanotechnology, such as drug delivery, biomedical imaging and gene therapy. We develop a model 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…
Despite tremendous progress in the research on self-assembled nanotechnological building blocks such as macromolecules, nanowires, and two-dimensional materials, synthetic self-assembly methods bridging nanoscopic to macroscopic dimensions…
The cornerstone of structural biology is the unique relationship between protein sequence and the 3D structure at equilibrium. Although intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not fold into a specific 3D structure, breaking this…
The self-assembly of complex structures from engineered subunits is a major goal of nanotechnology, but controlling their size becomes increasingly difficult in larger assemblies. Existing strategies present significant challenges, among…
Nanoparticles with "sticky patches" have long been proposed as building blocks for the self-assembly of complex structures. The synthetic realizability of such patchy particles, however, greatly lags behind predictions of patterns they…
We use a coarse-grained model of DNA-functionalized particles to understand the role of DNA chain length on their self-assembly. We find that the increasing chain length for a given particle size decreases the propensity to form ordered…
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 self-assembly processes, kinetic trapping effects often hinder the formation of thermodynamically stable ordered states. In a model of viral capsid assembly and in the phase transformation of a lattice gas, we show how simulations in a…
We devise an inverse statistical-mechanical methodology to find optimized interaction potentials that lead spontaneously to a target many-particle configuration. Target structures can possess varying degrees of disorder, thus extending the…
In contrast to most self-assembling synthetic materials, which undergo unbounded growth, many biological self-assembly processes are self-limited. That is, the assembled structures have one or more finite dimensions that are much larger…
The thermoelectric power factor of hierarchically nanostructured materials is investigated using the nonequilibrium Greens function method for quantum transport, including interactions of electrons with acoustic and optical phonons. We…
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…
Assembly of multi-part physical structures is both a valuable end product for autonomous robotics, as well as a valuable diagnostic task for open-ended training of embodied intelligent agents. We introduce a naturalistic physics-based…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
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…
Creating materials with structure that is independently controllable at a range of scales requires breaking naturally occurring hierarchies. Breaking these hierarchies can be achieved via the decoupling of building block attributes from…
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…
Self-assembled structures are possible solutions to the problem of increasing the density and connectivity of memristive units in massive arrays. Although they would allow surpassing the limit imposed by the lithographic feature size, the…
We investigate the problem of multiplex graph embedding, that is, graphs in which nodes interact through multiple types of relations (dimensions). In recent years, several methods have been developed to address this problem. However, the…