A simple hydrodynamic model has been developed to explain the experimentally observed chirality selection in stirred solutions of self-assembling achiral dyes. Selection depends on the stirring direction: the dichroic signal reverses its shape in clockwise or anti-clockwise rotations. Our model investigates the possible role of the liquid-solid interface in nucleating, growing, and transferring to the bulk of chiral seeds. The nucleation step requires a double modulation of the hydrodynamic field exhibiting different velocity along two orthogonal axes. Under a series of restrictions, such a condition is easily met at the solid-liquid interface and it is dictated by the boundary conditions and geometry of stirring. In stagnant conditions, growing helices made-up of self-assembled achiral dyes have no chiral preference forming a racemic mixture that contains identical amount of right-handed (R) and left-handed (L) configurations. The application of a hydrodynamic torque (related to the velocity gradient and width of the helix) breaks down the original symmetry, a further velocity gradient perpendicular to the first one ensures, after averaging, a slightly different population of R and L conformations. The yields of the hydrodynamic-induced chirality excess are extremely tiny, hence the suggested mechanism is significant only if next chirality amplification processes are efficient. Again, hydrodynamics provides a tool for the detachment of weakly bound aggregates once they have reached a critical length. Aggregates are transported in the bulk where the ripening process goes to completion. The efficiency of the surface catalytic effect strongly depends on the aggregate-surface sticking energy, reaching a maximum at intermediate sticking energies (of order of 10 kT). Numerical estimates show that the proposed mechanism is rather efficient, giving rise to entatiomeric excesses near (but smaller than) those experimentally found.

A semiquantitative theory aimed to describe the adhesion kinetics between soft objects, such as living cells or vesicles, has been developed. When rigid bodies are considered, the adhesion kinetics is successfully described by the classical Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey, and Overbeek (DLVO) picture, where the energy profile of two approaching bodies is given by a two asymmetrical potential wells separated by a barrier. The transition probability from the long-distance to the short-distance minimum defines the adhesion rate. Conversely, soft bodies might follow a different pathway to reach the short-distance minimum: thermally excited fluctuations give rise to local protrusions connecting the approaching bodies. These transient adhesion sites are stabilized by short-range adhesion forces (e.g., ligand-receptor interactions between membranes brought at contact distance), while they are destabilized both by repulsive forces and by the elastic deformation energy. Above a critical area of the contact site, the adhesion forces prevail: the contact site grows in size until the complete adhesion of the two bodies inside a short-distance minimum is attained. This nucleation mechanism has been developed in the framework of a nonequilibrium Fokker–Planck picture by considering both the adhesive patch growth and dissolution processes. In addition, we also investigated the effect of the ligand-receptor pairing kinetics at the adhesion site in the time course of the patch expansion. The ratio between the ligand-receptor pairing kinetics and the expansion rate of the adhesion site is of paramount relevance in determining the overall nucleation rate. The theory enables one to self-consistently include both thermodynamics (energy barrier height) and dynamic (viscosity) parameters, giving rise in some limiting cases to simple analytical formulas. The model could be employed to rationalize fusion kinetics between vesicles, provided the short-range adhesion transition is the rate-limiting step to the whole adhesion process. Approximate relationships between the experimental fusion rates reported in the literature and parameters such as membrane elastic bending modulus, repulsion strength, temperature, osmotic forces, ligand-receptor binding energy, solvent and membrane viscosities are satisfactory explained by our model. The present results hint a possible role of the initial long-distance→short-distance transition in determining the whole fusion kinetics.