Multifarious Assembly Mixtures: Systems Allowing Retrieval of Diverse Stored Structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces multifarious assembly mixtures that can self-assemble into many different structures from shared components, with efficient retrieval mechanisms, advancing the design of versatile self-assembling systems.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel scheme for creating multifarious assembly mixtures capable of forming diverse structures from shared components, with minimal parameter tuning for retrieval.

Findings

Number of stored structures increases rapidly with component types

Each structure can be retrieved by tuning few parameters

Implications for artificial and biological self-assembly discussed

Abstract

Self-assembly materials are traditionally designed so that molecular or meso-scale components form a single kind of large structure. Here, we propose a scheme to create "multifarious assembly mixtures", which self-assemble many different large structures from a set of shared components. We show that the number of multifarious structures stored in the solution of components increases rapidly with the number of different types of components. Yet, each stored structure can be retrieved by tuning only a few parameters, the number of which is only weakly dependent on the size of the assembled structure. Implications for artificial and biological self-assembly are discussed.