Enzyme driven modulation of spatiotemporal dynamic self-assembly patterns

Nature has always been the source of inspiration due to the occurrence of a wide variety of shapes and structures. Among all individual species, the living world is rich with strips and molted patterns of contrasting colors with sculptural counterparts of those manifested as surface crests and troughs, with organizational and behavioral patterns. For example, the color patterns in butterflies, snail shells, seashells, etc., are a unique phenomenon of biological pattern generation. The shell pattern may be thought of as a space-time map. Spider creates its sticky orb according to a genetic formula for setting up the web’s various radii and spirals. Self-organizing patterns may also be seen in the non- living environment. They can be found in mineral deposits between sedimentary rock layers, along the course of a lightning bolt as it falls to the earth, and in the undulating ripples of windblown sand on a desert dune.

Spatiotemporally dynamic assemblies generated by chemical interaction between components result in the emergence of a complicated phenomenon. The spatiotemporal word consists of two words: spatial means in space and temporal means with time. This area has been advanced as one of the most important scientific problems for understanding complex networking patterns in nature, such as connectivity in living cells or neuronal networks or the creation of next-generation materials. Chemists have also succeeded in developing dynamic self-organized systems with superior properties such as self-sorting, self-replication, and the capacity to use both physical and chemical energy from the environment in the previous decade. Many functional chemical-fuel- driven transiently produced self-assembled structures inspired by the dynamic self- organization of tubulin or actin (powered by GTP or ATP) have been described in this field. However, the propagation and durability of chemical-fuel-driven ordered systems or transiently developed systems owing to a catalytic process have not been thoroughly investigated in a synthetic approach, especially in terms of their spatial organization over time.

Herein, we demonstrated how population dynamics of self-assembled units emerged under both agonistic and antagonistic situations as a function of time and space. Agonistic refers to the condition which favors the assembly while antagonistic refers to those favoring the disassembly. In one scenario, concentration gradients of the surfactant (principal self-assembly controlling unit) and the enzyme were introduced from two distinct locations in a system containing uniform substrate concentration. In another scenario, the spatiotemporal aggregation behaviour of a uniformly distributed ATP- stabilized surfactant in a two-dimensional space was observed when HK and ALP concentration gradients were introduced simultaneously from opposing sides, resulting in agonistic and antagonistic conditions.