Departament de Física de la Matéria Condensada, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Avinguda Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain.
Phys Chem Chem Phys. 2019 Aug 15;21(32):17475-17493. doi: 10.1039/c9cp01088b.
A set of disordered interacting building blocks may form ordered structures by means of a self-assembling process. An external intervention in the system by adding a chemical species or by applying forces leads to different self-assembly scenarios with the appearance of new structures. For instance, the formation of microtubules, gels, virus capsides, cells and living beings among others takes place by self-assembly under nonequilibrium conditions. A general evolution criterion able to account for why nature selects some structures outside equilibrium and not others is lacking. Nevertheless, progress in the understanding of nonequilibrium self-assembly (NESA) mechanisms has been made thanks to the formulation of models that take particular situations into consideration. We review recent efforts devoted to describing self-assembly out of equilibrium and we provide a reference linking several current concepts in order to help in the development of new models and experimental studies. We hope that the knowledge of the intimate mechanisms leading to the formation of structures will make the implementation of re-configurable and bio-inspired materials possible and give a simpler perspective on the understanding of the emergence of life.
一组无序的相互作用的构建块可以通过自组装过程形成有序的结构。通过添加化学物质或施加外力对系统进行外部干预，会导致出现不同的自组装场景，并出现新的结构。例如，微管、凝胶、病毒衣壳、细胞和生物等的形成都是在非平衡条件下通过自组装发生的。缺乏能够解释为什么自然界选择某些非平衡结构而不是其他结构的一般进化标准。然而，由于考虑了特定情况的模型的制定，在理解非平衡自组装（NESA）机制方面已经取得了进展。我们回顾了最近致力于描述非平衡自组装的努力，并提供了一个参考，将几个当前的概念联系起来，以帮助开发新的模型和实验研究。我们希望对导致结构形成的内在机制的了解将使可重构和仿生材料的实现成为可能，并为理解生命的出现提供更简单的视角。
