Abstract

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.