Most of us have felt the frustration of getting our car washed, only to have it rained on shortly thereafter. It’s even more depressing after a fresh coat of wax! As you’ve probably seen, water on a freshly waxed car spontaneously forms droplets in a seemingly random pattern.
Keck Grantee Omar Saleh from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was interested in how microscopic droplet formation might govern how DNA is packaged and regulated in living cells.
To study this, Saleh’s team created DNA ‘nanostars’ that spontaneously form microscopic droplets in solution, just like raindrops beading up on the hood of a car. Surprisingly, they discovered that droplets which appear to be distributed randomly in space, actually show long-range order known as ‘hyperuniformity’. Hyperuniformity is thought to underlie processes as diverse as how wheat grains pack in a silo, to how the early universe was organized.
With Keck Foundation support, the UCSB team has discovered a tunable experimental system that will enable them to study many aspects of hyperuniformity that may have direct implications in disciplines ranging from astronomy to biology.
