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research article

Identifying and Tracking Defects in Dynamic Supramolecular Polymers

Gasparotto, Piero  
•
Bochicchio, Davide
•
Ceriotti, Michele  
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January 23, 2020
The Journal of Physical Chemistry B

A central paradigm of self-assembly is to create ordered structures starting from molecular monomers that spontaneously recognize and interact with each other via noncovalent interactions. In recent years, great efforts have been directed toward perfecting the design of a variety of supramolecular polymers and materials with different architectures. The resulting structures are often thought of as ideally perfect, defectfree supramolecular fibers, micelles, vesicles, etc., having an intrinsic dynamic character, which are typically studied at the level of statistical ensembles to assess their average properties. However, molecular simulations recently demonstrated that local defects that may be present or may form in these assemblies, and which are poorly captured by conventional approaches, are key to controlling their dynamic behavior and properties. The study of these defects poses considerable challenges, as the flexible/dynamic nature of these soft systems makes it difficult to identify what effectively constitutes a defect and to characterize its stability and evolution. Here, we demonstrate the power of unsupervised machine-learning techniques to systematically identify and compare defects in supramolecular polymer variants in different conditions, using as a benchmark 5 angstrom resolution coarse-grained molecular simulations of a family of supramolecular polymers. We show that this approach allows a complete data-driven characterization of the internal structure and dynamics of these complex assemblies and of the dynamic pathways for defects formation and resorption. This provides a useful, generally applicable approach to unambiguously identify defects in these dynamic self-assembled materials and to classify them based on their structure, stability, and dynamics.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1021/acs.jpcb.9b11015
Web of Science ID

WOS:000509438300015

Author(s)
Gasparotto, Piero  
Bochicchio, Davide
Ceriotti, Michele  
Pavan, Giovanni M.
Date Issued

2020-01-23

Publisher

AMER CHEMICAL SOC

Published in
The Journal of Physical Chemistry B
Volume

124

Issue

3

Start page

589

End page

599

Subjects

Chemistry, Physical

•

Chemistry

•

water

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
COSMO  
Available on Infoscience
March 3, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/166762
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