Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Other biological topics, Materials engineering, Nano-materials, Nano-processes, Other engineering and technologies

Publication Details

Communications Materials

Abstract

Everywhere in our surroundings we increasingly come in contact with nanostructures that have distinctive complex shape features on a scale comparable to the particle itself. Such shape ensembles can be made by modern nano-synthetic methods and many industrial processes. With the ever growing universe of nanoscale shapes, names such as “nanoflowers” and “nanostars” no longer precisely describe or characterise the distinct nature of the particles. Here we capture and digitise particle shape information on the relevant size scale and create a condensed representation in which the essential shape features can be captured, recognized and correlated. We find the natural emergence of intrinsic shape groups as well-defined ensemble distributions and show how these may be analyzed and interpreted to reveal novel aspects of our nanoscale shape environment. We show how these ideas may be applied to the interaction between the nanoscale-shape and the living universe and provide a conceptual framework for the study of nanoscale shape biological recognition and identity.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-020-0033-2

Funder

Science Foundation Ireland; Guangdong Provincial Education Department; Irish Research Council; Chinese Scholarship Council; CNPq

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