Event Type: IFIMAColloquium
Title: LLPS vs LLCPS: lesson learned from amyloid and nanocellulose fibrils
When: Friday, 14th March, 2025, at 12:00h
Where: Sala de Grados, Building C, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Speaker: Raffaele Mezzenga, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Liquid-Liquid phase separation (LLPS) of flexible macromolecules is ubiquitous in nature and implies the demining of a macromolecule rich-phase (often as droplets) from a macromolecules-depleted continuous phase. In the case of filamentous colloids or semiflexible polymers, the process is similar in the outcome, but fundamentally different in the ruling physics since the process switches from being enthalpy to entropy-dominated, resulting in the so-called liquid-liquid crystalline phase separation (LLCPS). In this talk I will discuss our recent work on LLCPS of amyloid and nanocellulose fibrils, the differences among these two classes of colloids, and new implications that this brings to the fields of liquid crystals and liquid-liquid phase separation in general. By selecting amyloid fibrils as model filamentous chiral colloids and nanocellulose as a control, we weight the effects of kinetics over thermodynamics by comparing heterogeneous colloidal systems based on nucleation and growth (N&G), spinodal decomposition (SD), and binodal thread break-up, a new microfluidic procedure recently developed in my group, which allows disentangling kinetics and thermodynamics and bring new insights into the process of LLCPS.
References
- G Nyström, M Arcari, R Mezzenga, Nature Nanotechnology 13, 330 (2018)
- M Bagnani, G Nyström, C De Michele, R Mezzenga, ACS Nano 13, 591 (2019)
- M Bagnani, P Azzari, S Assenza, R Mezzenga, Scientific Reports 9, 1-9 (2019)
- H Almohammadi, M Bagnani & R Mezzenga, Nature Communications 11, 5416 (2020)
- H Almohammadi, SA Khadem, M Bagnani, AD Rey, R Mezzenga, Nature Communications 13, 2778 (2022)
- H Almohammadi, S Martinek, Y Yuan, P Fischer, R Mezzenga, Nature Communications 14, 607 (2023)
- H Almohammadi, Y Fu, R Mezzenga, ACS nano 17, 3098 (2023)
- P Azzari, M Bagnani, R Mezzenga, Soft Matter 17, 6627 (2021)
- P Azzari, R Mezzenga, Soft Matter 19, 1873 (2023)
