How polymers, whether man-made or biological, organise themselves into structures ranging in size from nanometres to micrometres was the subject of a Faraday Discussion meeting, Self-organising polymers, in Leeds, UK, earlier this year.

How polymers, whether man-made or biological, organise themselves into structures ranging in size from nanometres to micrometres was the subject of a Faraday Discussion meeting, Self-organising polymers, in Leeds, UK, earlier this year.

Timothy Lodge from the University of Minnesota, US, opened proceedings by explaining the motivation for the meeting: ’Self-assembly is often considered the epitome of "bottom-up" engineering, as the processing of nanostructures may be very economical in terms of labour or energy input’ and went on to survey his own group’s research over the past few years in understanding why and in what conditions polymers form films, lattices, chains and vesicles.

Tony Ryan of the University of Sheffield, UK, summed up the wide scope of the meeting and the challenges for the future by concluding, ’For me the biggest question is how do we put all these theoretical concepts together into a theory of nanotechnology? Or even more difficult, a theory of biology?’

Colin Batchelor

References

T P Lodge et al, Faraday Discuss., 2005, 128, 1 <MAN>b412755m</MAN>