Related papers: Self-assembly Through Programmable Folding

The intricate three-dimensional geometries of protein tertiary structures underlie protein function and emerge through a folding process from one-dimensional chains of amino acids. The exact spatial sequence and configuration of amino…

Ordered nanoarrays, i.e. regular patterns of quantum structures at the nanometre scale, have recently been synthesized in a wide range of systems. Here I explore a possible route to technological exploitation: assuming a simple form of…

Nanoparticles tethered with DNA strands are promising building blocks for bottom-up nanotechnology, and a theoretical understanding is important for future development. Here we build on approaches developed in polymer physics to provide…

Inverse design can be a useful strategy for discovering interactions that drive particles to spontaneously self-assemble into a desired structure. Here, we extend an inverse design methodology--relative entropy optimization--to determine…

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…

Using an off-lattice model, we fully enumerate folded conformations of polypeptide chains of up to N = 19 monomers. Structures are found to differ markedly in designability, defined as the number of sequences with that structure as a unique…

Self-assembly materials are traditionally designed so that molecular or meso-scale components form a single kind of large structure. Here, we propose a scheme to create "multifarious assembly mixtures", which self-assemble many different…

Understanding how to produce forces using biomolecular building blocks is essential for the development of adaptive synthetic cells and living materials. Here we ask whether a dynamic polymer system can generate deformation forces in soft…

The native state structures of globular proteins are stable and well-packed indicating that self-interactions are favored over protein-solvent interactions under folding conditions. We use this as a guiding principle to derive the geometry…

The function of protein, RNA, and DNA is modulated by fast, dynamic exchanges between three-dimensional conformations. Conformational sampling of biomolecules with exact and nullspace inverse kinematics, using rotatable bonds as revolute…

Co-assembly of inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) and nanostructured polymer matrix represents an intricate interplay of enthalpic or entropic forces. Particle size largely affects the phase behavior of the nanocomposite. Theoretical studies…

We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an idealised model for the robust self-assembly of two-dimensional structures called polyominoes. The model includes rules that encode interactions between sets of square tiles that drive the…

Crystalline films offer various physical properties based on the modulation of their thicknesses and atomic structures. The layer-by-layer assembly of atomically thin crystals provides powerful means to arbitrarily design films at the…

Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…

DNA based nanostructures built on a long single stranded DNA scaffold, known as DNA origamis, offer the possibility to organize various molecules at the nanometer scale in one pot experiments. The folding of the scaffold is guaranteed by…

We ask the question of how small a self-assembling set of tiles can be yet have interesting computational behaviour. We study this question in a model where supporting walls are provided as an input structure for tiles to grow along: we…

The fabrication of nanomaterials involves self-ordering processes of functional molecules on inorganic surfaces. To obtain specific molecular arrangements, a common strategy is to equip molecules with functional groups. However, focusing on…

Because of its promising contribution to the bottom-up approach for nanofabrication of complex molecular architectures, self-organization is widely studied nowadays. Numerous studies have tackled supramolecular chirality or low-dimensional…

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…

A novel type of hybrid colloids is presented, based on the association of several polymeric systems and ferrofluids. On the one hand, we use inorganic nanoparticles made of magnetic iron oxide prepared at the LI2C, which response to a…