Game-changing new theory upends what we know about how charged macromolecules self-assemble: Long ignored, dipole-dipole interactions give life its shape

In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers recently announced that uniformly charged macromolecules -- or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge -- can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends our understanding of how some of life's basic structures are built.