(533d) Orientation of Biomaterial Based Liquid Crystal Phases and Its Application

Organization of biopolymer is significant for not only an evolution of a biological system but also construction of material for well-defined nanostructures. Recently, several researchers have investigated a formation of liquid crystalline pattern of semi-flexible biopolymers such as a DNA and Sunset yellow (SSY).^1-3 However, the pattern of biopolymers was formed on restricted area that makes this intriguing patterns hard to utilize in useful applications.^4,5

In the recent work, the 2D liquid crystalline patterns of DNA was generated when the mechanical shearing was applied on the aqueous DNA sample under the topographic confinement in drying process, in which the spontaneous shear-aligning process was a key idea to make the regularly arranged micro-paterns.^6,7 The aligned patterns were analyzed by polarized optical microscopy (POM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). We believe the 2D micro-patterns fabricated in large area can suggest a hint to use DNA materials for organizing multiscale hierarchical structures of soft- and biomaterials.

1. L. Vonna et al., Langmuir, 21, 9635-9643 (2005).

2. I. I. Smalyukh et al., Phy. Rev. Lett. 96, 177801 (2006).

3. Y. J. Cha and D. K. Yoon, Adv. Mater. 9, 1604247 (2017).

4. Y. J. Cha et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Inter., 7, 13627 (2015).

5. Y. J. Cha, D. S.Kim and D. K. Yoon, Adv. Func. Mater. 27, 1703790 (2017).

6. Y. J. Cha, S. M. Park, R. You, H. Kim and D. K. Yoon, Nat. Commun., 10, 2512 (2019).

7. S.M. Park et al., Small, 16, 2002449 (2020).