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During the lifecycle of a virus, viral proteins and other components self-assemble to form a symmetric protein shell called a capsid. This assembly process is subject to multiple competing constraints, including the need to form a…
In colloid and nanoparticle chemistry, particle size, shape, crystallinity, surface morphology and composition are controlled by employing the mechanisms of burst nucleation, diffusional growth, aggregation, or their combinations. Here we…
Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…
It has recently been proposed that proteins embedded in lipidic bio-membranes can spontaneously self-organize into stable small clusters, or membrane nano-domains, due to the competition between short-range attractive and longer-range…
The physical and chemical properties of metal nanoparticles differ significantly from those of free metal atoms as well as from the properties of bulk metals, and therefore, they may be viewed as a transition regime between the two physical…
Molecular packing, crystallinity, and texture of semiconducting polymers are often critical to performance. Although frame-works exist to quantify the ordering, interpretations are often just qualitative, resulting in imprecise and liberal…
Understanding how monomeric proteins fold under in vitro conditions is crucial to describing their functions in the cellular context. Significant advances both in theory and experiments have resulted in a conceptual framework for describing…
We show in simulations that a rich variety of novel orderings such as pinwheel and star states can be realized for colloidal molecular crystal mixtures at rational ratios of the number of colloids to the number of minima from an underlying…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
The protein folding problem is stated and a list of properties that do not depend upon specific molecules is compiled and analyzed. The relationship of this analysis to future simulations is emphasized. The choice of power and time as…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…
Configurational entropy is an important factor in the free energy change of many macromolecular recognition and binding processes, and has been intensively studied. Despite great progresses that have been made, the global sampling remains…
Control of stochastic systems is a challenging open problem in statistical physics, with potential applications in a wealth of systems from biology to granulates. Unlike most cases investigated so far, we aim here at controlling a genuinely…
The extraordinary success in laser cooling, trapping, and coherent manipulation of atoms has energized the efforts in extending this exquisite control to molecules. Not only are molecules ubiquitous in nature, but the control of their…
We solve a model that takes into account entropic barriers, frustration, and the organization of a protein-like molecule. For a chain of size $M$, there is an effective folding transition to an ordered structure. Without frustration, this…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
The ordering of nanoparticles into predetermined configurations is of importance to the design of advanced technologies. In this work, we moderate the surface anchoring against the bulk elasticity of liquid crystals to dynamically shape…
Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…
The extent of coupling between the folding of a protein and its binding to a substrate varies from protein to protein. Some proteins have highly structured native states in solution, while others are natively disordered and only fold fully…