Self-Assembly of Lipid-Biopolymer Periodic Nanostructures on Photonic Length Scales

Abstract

The self-assembly of photonic nanostructures in insects involves chitin, proteins, and lipids. While synthetic photonic systems have been extensively studied, current lipid-based self-assembly systems are limited in periodicity to $68\,\text{nm}$ compared to photonic length scales ($\approx 450\,\text{nm}$) observed in biological organisms. We hypothesise that lipids facilitate how structural colour arises in vivo by acting as templates for the self-assembly of biopolymers via lipidic lyotropic liquid crystal mesophases. Here, we aim to understand and identify how structural colour is produced in insects by the co-assembly of lipids and biopolymers. We study the effect of biopolymers, pH, temperature, surface charge, and stability on lipid vesicles using dynamic light scattering, X-ray scattering, and zeta potential analysis. Using cryo-electron microscopy, we demonstrate that these vesicles interact with the biopolymers and generate periodic nanostructures with periodicities ranging from $700\,\text{nm}$ to $1.2\,μ\text{m}$ (more than ten times larger than for purely lipidic systems) and dimensionalities ranging from 1D to 3D. Our results establish that lipid mesophases and biopolymers can induce reorganisation into ordered nanostructures, overcoming key limitations of periodicities achieved by lipid-only systems, and providing a methodology for recreating the physicochemical mechanisms underlying biophotonic structural colour.