Towards the principles of self assembly
Michael Brenner
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University
Abstract:
Self assembly is the idea of creating a system whose
component parts spontaneously assemble into a structure of
interest. In biological systems, there are striking examples
where complicated structures (ie the bacterial ribosome) can
spontaneously assemble, presumably with high yield, driven by specific
interactions between the components. But how can
systems be designed to have this property? How should interactions be
chosen to promote the assembly of a particular structure? Should bonds
be chosen to be reversible or irreversible? Given a set of design
rules, can all structures be built with high yield? Or are some
structures more designable than others?
Recent technological advances have created the opportunity
for making natural and technologically relevant systems that self
assemble, by e.g. coating colloidal particles with stickers
(e.g., DNA) so that every particle interacts with every other particle
in a different way.
We will discuss how self assembly works in this system, through theory,
numerical simulation and experiment -- and start to speculate as
to whether resulting principles might be useful for unravelling the
rules of biological self assembly.