Related papers: Dynamic Pathways for Viral Capsid Assembly
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…
Self-assembly is traditionally described as the process through which an initially disordered system relaxes towards an equilibrium ordered phase only driven by local interactions between its building blocks. However, This definition is too…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
Plug conveying along a vertical tube has been investigated through simulation, using a discrete element simulation approach for the granulate particles and a pressure field approach for the gas. The result is compared with an experiment.…
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 present a simple kinetic model for the assembly of small single-stranded RNA viruses that can be used to carry out analytical packaging contests between different types of RNA molecules. The RNA selection mechanism is purely kinetic and…
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…
The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
Kinetic traps are a notorious problem in equilibrium statistical mechanics, where temperature quenches ultimately fail to bring the system to low energy configurations. Using multifarious self-assembly as a model system, we introduce a…
Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…
We demonstrate a novel method to assemble and transport swarms of colloidal particles by combining liquid crystals enabled electrophoresis and photo-sensitive surface patterning. Colloidal particles are propelled in a nematic liquid crystal…
The precise arrangement of microscopic objects is critical to the development of functional materials and ornately patterned surfaces. Here, we present an acoustics-based method for the rapid arrangement of microscopic particles into…
We theoretically show that a superposition of plane waves causes small (compared to the wavelength) particles dispersed in a fluid to assemble in quasiperiodic two or three dimensional patterns. We experimentally demonstrate this theory by…
We study the elastic properties and mechanical stability of viral capsids under external force-loading with computer simulations. Our approach allows the implementation of specific geometries corresponding to specific phages such as…
An assembly is a large population of neurons whose synchronous firing is hypothesized to represent a memory, concept, word, and other cognitive categories. Assemblies are believed to provide a bridge between high-level cognitive phenomena…
Colloidal mixtures represent a versatile model system to study transport in complex environments. They allow for a systematic variation of the control parameters, namely size ratio, total volume fraction and composition. We study the…
Charged (nano)particles confined in electrodynamic traps can evolve into strongly correlated Coulomb systems which are the subject of current investigation. Exciting physical phenomena associated to Coulomb systems are reported such as…
In living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
The self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is more and more used in the field of functional materials. However, there is still a lack of analysis on the dynamic transformation paths of different self-assembly morphologies, which…
Based on multiple simulation trajectories, which started from dispersively selected initial conformations, the weighted ensemble dynamics method is designed to robustly and systematically explore the hierarchical structure of complex…