The ultimate mesoscopic LEGO: complex self-assembly from anisotropic building blocks

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• Szilard Fejer (CUC3)
• Friday 05 June 2009, 12:00-13:00
• Unilever Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Mark Miller.

Thesis presentation

Being able to design molecular building blocks that efficiently self-assemble into nanostructures with well-defined shape is an important contemporary research goal. The building blocks considered are often anisotropic. In order to approach the ‘bottom-up’ design idea effectively, it is useful to try to understand how complex nanostructures existent in nature might form from their building blocks. In this talk I will be presenting energy landscape studies on new rigid body potentials that support a wide range of low-energy structures often found in biological systems, including helical strands, open tubes, icosahedral shells reminiscent to virus capsids, and even complex head-tail structures. By creating the simplest virus capsid model to date, we show that the assembly of complex structures proceeds via universal guiding principles determined by the anisotropy of the building blocks.

This talk is part of the Extra Theoretical Chemistry Seminars series.

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• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
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• Unilever Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry

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