Kraft Lab - Self-assembly in Biological and Soft Matter

Research in the Daniela Kraft Lab focuses on self-assembly in biological and soft matter systems, ranging from anisotropic colloidal particles to lipid membranes, emulsions, and viruses.

Daniela Kraft about the Athena Prize 2019 Daniela Kraft is the winner of the 2019 Athena Prize, intended for women who do excellent scientific research in the field of chemistry and are an inspiration to others. It is important that they contribute to educational, administrative, communications or other activities that are relevant to society.

Anisotropic Colloids The synthesis of novel types of colloidal particles with anisotropic shapes and interactions plays a central role in our research. We continuously develop new approaches and modifications to be able to answer fundamental physics questions.

Self-assembly of Colloidal Particles We aim at guiding and understanding the self assembly of complex colloidal particles into designer structures and employ them for creating functional materials. We use state-of-the art confocal microscopy methods to image the kinetic assembly pathways and resulting structures in situ.

Quantitative particle tracking We study the thermally induced random motion of colloidal particles with various anisotropic shapes by confocal microscopy. Particle tracking routines allow us to obtain full information about the position and orientation of the particles and extract quantitative information about the full diffusion coefficient matrix.

Membrane-mediated interactions Lipid membranes compartmentalize cells and obtain functionality by attached and inserted proteins. We use a colloidal model system to quantitatively study the interaction between objects that deform lipid membranes to unravel the forces behind protein organizations in cells.

Past research projects: Virus Assembly Natural viruses spontaneously assemble from coat proteins and their genome. We aim at identifying the crucial features for the assembly of viruses by developing theoretical models and synthetic proteins in collaboration with Paul van der Schoot (TU Eindhoven) and Renko de Vries and Joris Sprakel (Wageningen University).

Past research projects: Spontaneously assembling Pickering Emulsions We studied the conditions for the spontaneous emulsification of mixtures of colloids in water and particular oils into particle stabilized ("Pickering") droplets.

News

Key Publications

Colloidal Recycling: Reconfiguration of Random Aggregates into Patchy Particles

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