The orientation of thermotropic liquid crystals (LC) is remarkably sensitive to the chemical and physical properties of vicinal interfaces; these phenomena are at the heart of traditional "alignment layers" that are ubiquitious in LC technology. The presence of long aliphatic chains at an LC interface has a particularly strong influence on LC anchoring, and even relatively small amounts of surfactants or lipids at an interface can be sufficient to trigger orientational changes of a macrosopic LC layer. At a fluid interface, such as that between an LC and an aqueous buffer, this can result in rich and complex behavior, involving the cooperative organization of surface-active molecules and the LC director field. Moreover, these phenomena can be exploited to engineer sensitive and selective sensing technologies, where molecular recognition events modify the structure of the interfacial layer, which in turn causes a change in the orientation of a macroscopic LC phase. Diverse examples involving nucleic acids will be described, where the changes in the interfacial LC alignment layer may be due directly to changes in secondary structure of adsorbed DNA or to interfacial events (e.g. liposome fusion) that are triggered by nucleic acid molecular recognition.

Engineering responsive liquid crystal interfaces with surfactants, lipids, and nucleic acids

251st National Meeting (2016)

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