NANO: Controlling Errors in Algorithmic Self-Assembly: Characterization, Modeling, and Implementation

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Biological organisms are self-organized chemical systems that carry out algorithms encoded in the genetic material, DNA. Biology thus provides clear proof that autonomous chemical systems can be programmed to compute. The ability to program biomolecular systems that control chemical fabrication and informationprocessing tasks would result in a dramatic increase in the level of sophistication in bionanotechnology. The Winfree laboratory has been developing programmable biomolecular systems based on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA { a molecular fabrication technique that acts as a universal constructor that can in principle create complex structures by embedding universal computation within the self-assembly processes, thus guiding the assembly of components based on an information-processing algorithm implemented by the molecular tiles. This experimental and theoretical research has indicated that with current error rates as high as 10% and seldom lower than 1%, fault-tolerant techniques must be used when implementing biomolecularcomputing systems. The proposed research will develop such techniques for algorithmic DNA self-assembly by developing fault-tolerant tile sets that reduce major types of assembly error: (1) Proofreading tile sets, which correct errors that occur during normal growth, will be experimentally demonstrated, with the goal of achieving error rates less than 10