Multifarious Assembly Mixtures: Systems Allowing Retrieval of Diverse Stored Structures

摘要

Self-assembly materials are traditionally designed so that molecular ormeso-scale components form a single kind of large structure. Here, we propose ascheme to create "multifarious assembly mixtures", which self-assemble manydifferent large structures from a set of shared components. We show that thenumber of multifarious structures stored in the solution of componentsincreases rapidly with the number of different types of components. Yet, eachstored structure can be retrieved by tuning only a few parameters, the numberof which is only weakly dependent on the size of the assembled structure.Implications for artificial and biological self-assembly are discussed.