Helices are essential building blocks of living organisms, be they molecular fragments of
proteins (α-helices), macromolecules (DNA and collagen), or multimolecular assemblies …

This review discusses liquid crystal phase formation by biopolymers in solution. Lyotropic
mesophases have been observed for several classes of biopolymer including DNA …

An overview is given of theory and experiments on liquid crystal phases which appear in
solutions of elongated colloidal particles or stiff polymers. The Onsager (1949) virial theory …

Defects and geometrical patterns embedded in orderly arrays of atoms and molecules
explain important everyday phenomena such as why soap is slippery, why steel is strong …

This perspective will overview an emerging paradigm for self-organized soft materials,
geometrically frustrated assemblies, where interactions between self-assembling elements …

We investigate the formation of ringlike deposits in drying drops of DNA. In analogy with the
colloidal “coffee rings,” DNA is transported to the perimeter by the capillary flow. At the …

Soft condensed matter physics, which emerged as a distinct branch of physics in the 1990s,
studies complex fluids: liquids in which structures with length scale between the molecular …

It has become almost axiomatic that protein folding and assembly are dominated by the
hydrophobic effect. The contributions from this, and other, hydrophilic interactions can now …

Cellular factors tightly regulate the architecture of bundles of filamentous cytoskeletal
proteins, giving rise to assemblies with distinct morphologies and physical properties, and a …

We have measured the equation of state for DNA solutions at different ionic strengths
covering 5 orders of magnitude in DNA osmotic pressure. At high osmotic pressures the …