THE first microscopic “knot laboratory” has been created inside a liquid crystal – and yes, it could help solve some knotty problems.
For instance, we know that enzymes unravel double-stranded DNA before proteins can be made. “But it’s still not very clear how this actually works,” says UroÅ¡ Tkalec of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. To investigate microscopic knots, Tkalec and colleagues turned to liquid crystals, which flow like fluids but whose constituent molecules line up in the same direction, like a solid crystal.
The team added silica particles coated with a surfactant to a liquid crystal, which…
