Critical hierarchical design parameters CHDPs

It is from this perspective that the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop entitled Periodic patterns, relationships and categories of well-defined nanoscale building blocks in 2007 [136]. This seminal workshop evolved an embryonic consensus that subsequently led to a proposed concept for defining and unifying nanoscience based on the integration of traditional chemistiy first principles with certain critical hierarchical design parameters (CHDPs) [137,138]. These CHDPs include size, shape, surface chemistiy, flexibOity/rigidity, composition, and architecture and appear to be conserved and transferred as a function of complexity (illustrated in Fig. 14). 

Fig. 14 Structural control of critical hierarchical design parameters (CHDPs), namely, size, shape, surface chemistry, flexibility/rigidity, composition, and architecture, required for bottom-up synthesis of higher nanostructural complexity manifesting atom mimicry...

Essentially, all other proposed hard-soft nano-element categories (Fig. 18) evolve from aufbau strategies that allow the control and conservation of critical hierarchical design parameters (CHDPs) from the atomic to the nanoscale level (i.e., CADP —> CMDP —> CNDP). Nature has already evolved very exquisite aufbau strategies for synthesizing other important soft matter nano-element categories such as proteins [S-4], viral capsids [S-5], and DNA/RNA [S-6]. 

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