Check out our most recent paper in Soft Matter

Our newest paper on electrostatically self-assembled materials was published in Soft Matter.

In this paper we demonstrate a strategy of employing electrostatically driven self-assembly to form responsive and functional materials by using artificial peptides combined with short fragment DNA. The thermal response of these hybrid materials, originating from the elastin-like segment of the peptides, is revealed through changes in DNA interaxial spacing and cholesteric liquid-crystalline pitch. The fact that the resulting materials exhibit a thermoreversible response while maintaining cholesteric liquid-crystalline behavior indicates that the assembly process interfered minimally with the functionality of the building blocks. Our results illustrate strategies to employ self-assembly for the design of functional materials.

Link to the paper