Self-Assembly of Biopolymers: Faraday Discussion 166

This volume focuses on the physical chemistry of novel self-assembling bio-conjugate or bio-hybrid materials.

Soft matter has emerged as a coherent subject within the last ten years, and is of increasing relevance to interdisciplinary research at the interface of physical chemistry, physics, materials science and biology. Recently several exciting new directions have been pursued in this area, including developments in understanding amyloid fibrillization, liposome and polymersome self-assembly, DNA superstructure formation, biopolymer hydrogel self-assembly and how to control this to develop tissue scaffolds, and the control of biopolymer self-assemblies for applications in biomedicine.

This volume focuses on the self-assembly of novel bio-hybrid materials, especially conjugates of proteins with polymers, glycosylation of proteins, polymer/virus hybrids etc.. Much work in this field has been driven by recent advances in synthetic methodology which has enabled exciting work on the production of self-assembling and self-organizing systems. These systems are under intense research for applications in tissue scaffolding, drug delivery systems. An understanding of the physical chemistry of self-assembly is essential for such applications.

Topics covered in this volume include:

- DNA condensation using polyelectrolytes

- Self-assembly of polymer/protein and polymer virus conjugates

- Self-assembly of lipids and polymerosomes

- Self-assembly of carbohydrate/gluco polymer hybrid materials