Viruses Taught To Self-Assemble Into Structures

Using a single-step process, researchers recently developed a technique to cause M13 phages to become building blocks for materials with a wide range of properties.These benign viruses self-assembled into hierarchically organized thin-film structures, with complexity that ranged from simple ridges, to wavy, chiral strands, to truly sophisticated patterns of overlapping strings of material. Each film presented specific properties for bending light, and several films were capable of guiding the growth of cells into structures with precise physical orientations. read more

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