We are fascinated by nanoparticles assembled from biomolecular building blocks. Since these nanoparticles are made of molecules like proteins or lipids, they are self-assembled by many weak noncovalent interactions, but they ultimately form singular objects. This leads us to ask many questions about their assembly and molecular behavior, such as:

• How do molecular contacts and chemical environment influence physical properties like cargo loading and density?

• Conversely, how does the physical assembly affect access to internalized cargo such as enzymes?

• What principles do biological nanocontainers use that we could apply for drug delivery or for generating specific molecules?

• How can we measure these effects on a benchtop microscope?

A key piece in studying these objects is that they are highly heterogeneous in their properties: each object is different in terms of aspects like their size, stoichiometry, and molecular arrangement within the particle, which means that we need to observe multiple properties simultaneously on single objects.