This year, the Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI) of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland is celebrating its 10th anniversary. We are proud that on this occasion we can showcase some of our current research activities in this special issue of Small. The AMI owes its existence to Dr. Adolphe Merkle, a successful local entrepreneur, who in 2007 established the Adolphe Merkle Foundation with an endowment of CHF 100 Mio. His support remains one of the most important private donations to academic activities in Switzerland. The institute was founded in 2008 by its first director, Peter Schurtenberger, who previously served the University of Fribourg as a professor in the Department of Physics. Prof. Schurtenberger developed the vision to create an interdisciplinary institute that focuses on soft nanomaterials and combines fundamental and application-oriented research. Under the leadership of Christoph Weder, who joined the AMI in 2009 as Professor of Polymer Chemistry and Materials and became the institute's director in 2010, the institute appointed Professors Alke Fink and Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser as co-chairs of BioNanomaterials and Michael Mayer as Professor of Biophysics. Prof. Schurtenberger left the institute to establish a new group at the University of Lund, and Ullrich Steiner was appointed as Professor of Soft Matter Physics. Supported with professorial fellowship grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Marco Lattuada and Nico Bruns established temporary junior research groups at the AMI, which focused on the assembly of nanomaterials and macromolecular chemistry, respectively. Both have in the meantime moved on to permanent positions in the University of Fribourg's Chemistry Department and the University of Strathclyde. The four permanent research groups already count about 100 researchers and the AMI has almost reached its target size of 120 associates. The institute occupies a 7500 m2 state-of-the-art research facility on the University of Fribourg's science campus. AMI's interdisciplinary research activities revolve around the development and investigation of soft nanomaterials such as nanoparticles, colloids, polymers, biomaterials, composites, nanostructures, and nanopores. The institute's research emphasizes bio-inspired materials design, stimuli-responsive materials, optical materials, energy materials, sensing, the detection of nanoparticles in complex media, and the investigation of the interactions of nanomaterials with biological systems. Most projects pursue a two-pronged research approach with the goal to advance fundamental knowledge and address practically relevant problems at the same time. AMI's mission also includes the training of the next generation of scientists. The institute already counts more than 150 alumni – most of them former PhD students, postdocs, group leaders, and junior professors, but also first graduates of a masters program – many of whom have established academic research groups of their own. We are delighted that half of the contributions in this issue come from such alumni. This issue covers a range of topics that are illustrative of AMI's interdisciplinary research activities. Several papers deal with assembly processes and/or (self-) assembled structures. In a concept article, Ilja Gunkel highlights how chemically and topographically patterned substrates can be used to generate defect-free patterns in block copolymer films. The team of Ilja Voets reports self-regulated complex coacervate core micelles with built-in sensors that report the temporally programmed disassembly, cargo release, reassembly, and cargo re-capture. Janne-Mieke Meijer and Jerome Crassous report on the phase behavior of bowl-shaped colloid particles and show that the phase-behavior of such particles is clearly different than that of their spherical counterpart. The group of Peter Schurtenberger shows how an applied magnetic field influences the collective dynamics of peanut-shaped colloidal particles featuring hematite cores and silica shells. Interestingly, these micrometer-sized particles align perpendicular to the applied field and form chains along the field direction. A consortium led by Ilja Gunkel, Bodo Wilts, and Ullrich Steiner and the groups of Jeremy Baumberg, Timothy Wilkinson, Morgan Stefik, and Ullrich Wiesner studied the self-assembly of a gyroid-forming triblock terpolymer during solvent-vapor annealing. Thomas Moore, Alke Fink, Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser and their team report on the decoration of nanoparticles with different amines and investigate how the bulkiness of the amine surface groups affects the formation of a protein corona and thereby cellular associations. The analysis of published papers (Figure 1) reveals that nanoparticles occupy a prominent place in the institute's research. Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) represent a particle type that has attracted particular interest among AMI researchers. In a concept article, Johan Foster and co-workers discuss the transformative and versatile role that CNCs and other cellulose nanomaterials can play in templating multi-scale mesostructured ceramics. A paper by Justin Zoppe, Elsa Reichmanis, Paul Russo, Christoph Weder, and co-workers introduces CNCs whose surfaces were modified with polymer grafts in a patchy manner. This architecture bestows CNCs with high colloidal stability and renders lyotropic aqueous dispersions thermally switchable. Pratheep Annamalai and co-workers show in a communication how the deposition of a thin layer of alumina enhances the detectability of CNCs in polymer composites by electron microscopy. Not with analytic but preparative goals in mind, Marco Lattuada's team used amyloid fibrils as templates for the preparation of high-aspect-ratio silica fibers. Several manuscripts address analytic techniques. Anna Stradner's group re-examined the use of dynamic light scattering-based tracer particle microrheology to measure the zero shear viscosity of concentrated aqueous protein solutions. They show that a combination of surface-functionalized tracer particles, a 3D-DLS technique, and carefully selected parameters are essential for a reliable and artifact-free results. Sandor Balog, Nico Bruns and co-workers show for the first time that dynamic depolarized light scattering can be used to detect hemozoin, a characteristic marker of malaria. In a concept article, Jared Houghtaling, Jonathan List, and Michael Mayer show how nanopores can be used to characterize individual amyloid particles that are associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, Chunpeng Wang, Ullrich Steiner, and Alessandro Sepe discuss data management issues and approaches in connection with synchroton experiments, in which large amounts of data are acquired. The use of micro- or nanocapsules to package, transport, and release a specific cargo is another topic that has attracted the interest of AMI researchers from different groups. To this end, this issue contains a concept article in which Céline Calvino and Christoph Weder review existing and present new ideas for microcapsule-containing self-reporting polymers. And in their review article, Yoan Simon and co-workers summarize recent efforts to create glassy polymersomes and activities to trigger shape transformations of such constructs. In a pair of review articles, Somayeh Gholipour and Michael Saliba, and Nga Phung and Antonio discuss factors that limit the stability of perovskite solar cells and present approaches to address this problem. While polymers are involved in many of AMI's research projects, they are often employed in an enabling manner. As a result, the review by Hua Zou et al. on cucurbit[8]uril-based polymers is the only contribution in this special issue in which polymers take the center stage. Last but not least, Bodo Wilts and Vinodkumar Saranathan report how Pachhyrhynchus congestus pavonius weevils use biophotonic crystals to create rainbow-colored spots on their wing cases. We hope that this collection of papers conveys that our researchers work hard and smart to make relevant contributions to science and to society and to keep AMI on its course to implement Adolphe Merkle's dream of a leading competence center for fundamental and application-oriented interdisciplinary research in the field of soft nanomaterials.