Six-fold director field configuration in amyloid nematic and cholesteric phases.

ABSTRACT: Chiral liquid crystals, or cholesteric phases, have been widely studied in the last decades, leading to fundamental advances and a multitude of applications and technologies. In general, the rich phenomenology of these systems depends directly on the molecular traits and conditions of the system, imposing precise symmetry to the resulting nematic field. By selecting amyloid fibrils as model filamentous chiral colloids, we report an unprecedented breadth of liquid crystalline morphologies, where up to six distinct configurations of the nematic field are observed under identical conditions. Amyloid-rich droplets show homogeneous, bipolar, radial, uniaxial chiral and radial chiral nematic fields, with additional parabolic focal conics in bulk. Variational and scaling theories allow rationaliz

SUBMITTER: Bagnani M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6718687 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature