Artificial Morphogenesis
Artificial morphogenesis is a process in which non-living objects undergo transitions that are similar to the morphogenesis processes of life. The driving forces are sometimes phase transitions as well as environmental fluctuations.
Recently discovered in oil droplets upon cooling,[1] this process is able to overcome the naturally occurring interfacial tension that keeps droplets spherical. Without the use of lithography, any external fields, or constraints, spherical droplets are able to deform bottom-up into a plethora of shapes, including icosahedra, octahedra, hexagons, triangles, rhomboids and fibres.[2]
The shapes observed are not random but are predicted by models that balance the competition between surface tension and the formation of a thin plastic (rotator) crystal layer under the surface inside the oil droplet.[3][4]
The process has been possible to generalise to a number of mixtures of compounds as complex as commercial Vaseline creams, and also to polymerise the particle shapes above.[5] This opens the potential to create efficient bottom-up manufacturing that is both energy and material-efficient, using almost 100% of the starting material. It can fundamentally relate to answering questions, such as how were the first protocells without genetic programming able to change shape.
References
- ↑ Denkov, Nikolai; Tcholakova, Slavka; Lesov, Ivan; Cholakova, Diana; Smoukov, Stoyan K. (December 2015). "Self-shaping of oil droplets via the formation of intermediate rotator phases upon cooling". Nature. 528 (7582): 392–395. doi:10.1038/nature16189. ISSN 0028-0836.
- ↑ Cholakova, Diana; Denkov, Nikolai; Tcholakova, Slavka; Lesov, Ivan; Smoukov, Stoyan K. (September 2016). "Control of drop shape transformations in cooled emulsions". Advances in Colloid and Interface Science. 235: 90–107. doi:10.1016/j.cis.2016.06.002.
- ↑ Haas, Pierre A.; Goldstein, Raymond E.; Smoukov, Stoyan K.; Cholakova, Diana; Denkov, Nikolai (2017-02-21). "Theory of Shape-Shifting Droplets". Physical Review Letters. 118 (8): 088001. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.088001. ISSN 0031-9007.
- ↑ Haas, Pierre A.; Cholakova, Diana; Denkov, Nikolai; Goldstein, Raymond E.; Smoukov, Stoyan K. (2019-09-16). "Shape-shifting polyhedral droplets". Physical Review Research. 1 (2): 023017. doi:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.1.023017. ISSN 2643-1564.
- ↑ Lesov, Ivan; Valkova, Zhulieta; Vassileva, Elena; Georgiev, George S.; Ruseva, Konstans; Simeonov, Marin; Tcholakova, Slavka; Denkov, Nikolai D.; Smoukov, Stoyan K. (2018-10-09). "Bottom-Up Synthesis of Polymeric Micro- and Nanoparticles with Regular Anisotropic Shapes". Macromolecules. 51 (19): 7456–7462. doi:10.1021/acs.macromol.8b00529. ISSN 0024-9297.
This article "Artificial Morphogenesis" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Artificial Morphogenesis. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
