18 Jan 2010
Membranes, nanoparticles and self-assembly
Julian Shillcock, Memphys, SDU, will give a seminar on the use of Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulations to explore the self-assembly of lipids, block copolymers and nanoparticles, in Copenhagen, on January 22.
Cellular processes span a huge range of length and time scales from the molecular to the nearmacroscopic. Understanding how effects on one scale influence, and are themselves influenced by, those on lower and higher scales is a critical issue for the construction of models in Systems Biology.
Self-assembly is a generic property of many entities at all scales in biology, from lipids assembling into vesicles, proteins folding, to cellular organization. But the pathway followed by a self-assembling system is often hard to visualize experimentally. Mesoscopic simulation techniques are able to span length and time scales from nanometers to microns for many microseconds while capturing sufficient molecular detail to reveal the molecular rearrangements that occur during selfassembly.
We have used Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulations to explore the self-assembly of lipids, block copolymers and nanoparticles, and to study the material properties of the resulting aggregates. Such simulations provide a cheap, yet often valuable, means of exploring the huge phase space of self-assembling systems, and can reveal connections between different scales that are hard to extract from experiments.
Seminar by Julian Shillcock, Memphys, SDU
Time: 22. januar 2010 kl. 10:00
Location: Room C115, H.C. Ørsted Instituttet, Universitetsparken 5, 2100 Copenhagen OE
Arranged by: Dimitrios Stamou, , +45 35 32 04 79