A team of scientists led by Eugenia Kumacheva, Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, Canada, has discovered a way to predict the organization of nanoparticles in larger forms by treating them much the same as ensembles of polymer molecules formed from standard chemical reactions.
The nanoparticles act as multifunctional single units, which form reversible, noncovalent bonds at specific bond angles and organize themselves into a highly ordered polymer.

According to the scientists this is a new approach that enables a quantitative prediction of the architecture of linear, branched, and cyclic self-assembled nanostructures, their aggregation numbers and size distribution, and the formation of structural isomers.

• Step-Growth Polymerization of Inorganic Nanoparticles,
  K. Liu, Z. Nie, N. Zhao, W. Li, M. Rubinstein, E. Kumacheva,
  Science 2010, 329 (5988), 197 – 200.
  DOI: 10.1126/science.1189457