self-assembly

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the autonomous organisation of components into ordered structures or patterns without external direction, driven by local interactions — electrostatic attraction, hydrophobic effect, hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces — between the components themselves; self-assembly is a fundamental principle in both biology — where it governs the folding of proteins, the formation of lipid bilayer membranes, the assembly of viral capsids, and the organisation of chromatin — and in nanoscience, where it is exploited to create functional nanostructures from molecular and nanoparticle building blocks without the labour-intensive top-down lithographic processes of conventional fabrication; hierarchical self-assembly — in which small components first assemble into intermediate structures which then assemble into larger architectures — is used to build complex functional materials including photonic crystals, drug delivery vesicles, and two-dimensional materials

Examples

• Amphiphilic block copolymers self-assemble into micelles or vesicles depending on the ratio of hydrophilic to hydrophobic blocks.
• DNA origami exploits the programmable self-assembly of complementary base pairs to fold single strands into precise two- and three-dimensional nanostructures.