Nanowerk January 19, 2022
Self-organization is a central feature of biological systems. Researchers in Germany have developed an approach based on the concept of time complexity, which allows new strategies to be created for the more efficient synthesizing of complex structures. They showed that different control scenarios can informatively be characterized by their time complexity, i.e., their scaling of the assembly time with the structure size, analogous to algorithms for computational problems. Especially for large structures, differences in the time complexity of the scenarios lead to strongly diverging time efficiencies. Most significantly, they showed that by effectively regulating the supply of constituents, high resource and time efficiency can be achieved for self-assembly processes. According to the researchers the new technique is comparable, and in some cases better, than the established methods…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Schematic description of the model. Credit: PNAS January 25, 2022 119 (4) e2116373119Â