Shape matters

摘要

From the invention of the wheel to the stacking of cannonballs and the design of stealth aircraft, humans have long known that shape matters. On a much smaller scale, the shapes of molecules affect their ability to form crystals, and enzyme shape is central to the binding of their substrates. Writing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Mirkin and colleagues~1 report a way in which shape can also affect the binding forces that hold nanometre-scale particles together — a discovery that suggests new approaches for constructing potentially useful architectures from these tiny building blocks.