Directed self-assembly, genomic assembly complexity and the formation of biological structure, or, what are the genes for nacre?

Abstract

Biology uses dynamical mechanisms of self-organization and self-assembly of materials, but it also choreographs and directs these processes. The difference between abiotic self-assembly and a biological process is rather like the difference between setting up and running an experiment to make a material remotely compared with doing it in one's own laboratory: with a remote experiment—say on the International Space Station—everything must be set up beforehand to let the experiment run ‘hands off’, but in the laboratory one can intervene at any point in a ‘hands-on’ approach. It is clear that the latter process, of directed self-assembly, can allow much more complicated experiments and produce far more complex structures than self-assembly alone. This control over self-assembly in biology is exercised at certain key waypoints along a trajectory and the process may be quantified in terms of the genomic assembly complexity of a biomaterial.