In this week's Nature, two researchers from the University of Chicago take one step closer toward scalable self assembly.

Self-assembly is emerging as an elegant, 'bottom-up' method for fabricating nanostructured materials. This approach becomes particularly powerful when the ease and control offered by the self-assembly of organic components is combined with the electronic, magnetic or photonic properties of inorganic components. Here we demonstrate a versatile hierarchical approach for the assembly of organic–inorganic, copolymer–metal nanostructures in which one level of self-assembly guides the next. ... We delineate two distinct assembly modes ... each characterized by different ordering kinetics and strikingly different current–voltage characteristics. These results therefore demonstrate the possibility of guided, large-scale assembly of laterally nanostructured systems.

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