Fig. 1: Relaxation of different classes of the amyloid fibril liquid crystalline droplets.
The sequence of time-lapse images of relaxation of initially extended amyloid fibrils liquid crystalline droplets with different volumes. In each panel, the first row shows the experimental results taken with LC (liquid crystal)-PolScope device. The colormaps corresponding to experimental results denote the orientation of the director filed in the x–z plane; the second row demonstrates the numerical simulation results with color bar capturing the director field orientation with respect to z-axis. The tactoids are at the homogenous configuration at the initial state and upon relaxation, they hold different configurations. a An initially extended tactoid with volume 644 µm3 undergoes shape relaxation while its configuration remains unchanged at homogenous configuration. b An elongated tactoid with volume 2751 µm3 relaxes both its shape and structure recovering a bipolar configuration upon relaxation. c A droplet with volume 16,414 µm3, having larger volume compared to (a, b), relaxes to a cholesteric structure with three bands. Since colors and director lines show the same information due to the axisymmetric nature of the homogenous (a) and bipolar (b) tactoids, the lines are not shown for better readability (see Supplementary Movies 4–6 for the version with lines). Note that the brightness of the experimental images is varied for better visualization.
