Related papers: Simulations of DNA-origami self-assembly reveal de…

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…

DNA origami is a widely used method to construct nanostructures by self-assembling designed DNA strands. These structures are often used as "pegboards" for templated assembly of proteins, gold nanoparticles, aptamers, and other molecules,…

Engineering shape and interactions of nanoscopic building blocks allows for the assembly of rationally designed macroscopic three-dimensional (3D) materials with spatial accuracy inaccessible to top-down fabrication methods. Owing to its…

Nucleation processes are at the heart of a large number of phenomena, from cloud formation to protein crystallization. A recently emerging area where nucleation is highly relevant is the initiation of filamentous protein self-assembly, a…

In many biopolymer solutions, attractive interactions that stabilize finite-sized clusters at low concentrations also promote phase separation at high concentrations. Here we study a model biopolymer system that exhibits the opposite…

Branched junction molecule assembly of DNA nanostructures, pioneered by Seeman's laboratory in the 1980s, has become increasingly sophisticated, as have the assembly targets. A critical design step is finding minimal sets of branched…

DNA nanotechnology allows for the realization of complex nanoarchitectures in which the spatial arrangements of different constituents and most functions can be enabled by DNA. When optically active components are integrated in such…

Coordinating functional parts to operate in concert is essential for machinery. In gear trains, meshed gears are compactly interlocked, working together to impose rotation or translation. In photosynthetic systems, a variety of biological…

One of the frontiers of nanotechnology is advancing beyond the periodic self-assembly of materials. Icosahedral quasicrystals, aperiodic in all directions, represent one of the most challenging targets that have yet to be experimentally…

Sophisticated statistical mechanics approaches and human intuition have demonstrated the possibility to self-assemble complex lattices or finite size constructs, but have mostly only been successful in silico. The proposed strategies quite…

Controlling the size and shape of assembled structures is a fundamental challenge in self-assembly, and is highly relevant in material design and biology. Here, we show that specific, but promiscuous, short-range binding interactions make…

Protein aggregation is of great importance in biology, e.g., in amyloid fibrillation. The aggregation processes that occur at the cellular scale must be highly stochastic in nature because of the statistical number fluctuations that arise…

Folding mechanisms are zero elastic energy motions essential to the deployment of origami, linkages, reconfigurable metamaterials and robotic structures. In this paper, we determine the fate of folding mechanisms when such structures are…

Molecular electronics and other technologies whose components comprise individual molecules have been pursued for half a century because the molecular scale represents the limit of miniaturisation of objects whose structure is tuneable for…

The interaction between light and matter can be controlled efficiently by structuring materials at a length scale shorter than the wavelength of interest. With the goal to build optical devices that operate at the nanoscale, plasmonics has…

Inverted repeat (IR) sequences in DNA can form non-canonical cruciform structures to relieve torsional stress. We use Monte Carlo simulations of a recently developed coarse-grained model of DNA to demonstrate that the nucleation of a…

DNA origami is a novel self-assembly technique allowing one to form various 2D shapes and position matter with nanometer accuracy. It has been used to coordinate placement of nanoscale objects, both organic and inorganic; to make molecular…

In recent years there have been a number of proposals to utilize the specificity of DNA based interactions for potential applications in nanoscience. One interesting direction is the self-assembly of micro- and nanoparticle clusters using…

DNA self-assembly is an important tool that has a wide range of applications such as building nanostructures, the transport of target virotherapies, and nano-circuitry. Tools from graph theory can be used to encode the biological process of…

DNA nanotechnology uses predictable interactions of nucleic acids to precisely engineer complex nanostructures. Characterizing these self-assembled structures at the single-structure level is crucial for validating their design and…