The mechanisms governing self-organization have long been a subject of interest for a large community of physicists, chemists and engineers. Biological systems, self-organize continuously with little errors on many length scales, in highly noisy conditions.

Previous studies of self assembly of biomolecules relied on fluorescent microscopy to visualize the self-organization process. Due to the diffraction limit, such investigations of dynamic systems are done with a resolution of approximately 200nm. As a result, little is known about the initial steps of self-organization, where the structural elements are too small to observe.

In this work, we characterize the process of self-organization of actin, and self-assembly of amyloids at early stages, at time scales unattainable previously, using Differential Dynamic Microscopy (DDM) and microrheology.