CS Forum: Dr. Vinay Kumar Gautam, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

CS department's public guest lecture on 'Dynamically Controlled Self-assembly of DNA Tiles'. The lecture is open to everyone free-of-charge.

Dr. Vinay Kumar Gautam
Department of Computer Science,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Host: Prof. Pekka Orponen
Time: 12:30 (coffee at 12:15)
Venue: T5, CS building

Dynamically Controlled Self-assembly of DNA Tiles

Abstract:

Over the last four decades, nucleic acids -based self-assembly has emerged as a powerful engineering paradigm to design nanostructures and to implement molecular computation processes. Algorithmic self-assembly designs of both the complex 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional nucleic acid-based nanostructures, and the molecular computation models have been demonstrated both theoretically and practically. However, the assembling structures are purely driven by the tendency of multi-component systems to minimize their free energy in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, and therefore there is no control over the internal states of an assembling system, and the structures once assembled can not be reconfigured reliably post-assembly. Introducing dynamic control in the nucleic acid-based self-assembly processes is promising 1) to improve our understanding of naturally occurring self-assembly and self-organization processes, and 2) to design reliable, complex and multiscale nanostructures and computational processes.

In this talk, which is based on my PhD research, I will discuss the designing of dynamically controlled DNA tiles for Erik Winfree's algorithmic tile self-assembly framework. Using these tile designs, I'll discuss: 1) how resilient and ordered assemblies of tiles can be designed using dynamic control that activates during local interactions between assembling tiles; 2) how a multiscale self-assembling system using globally controlled tiles can be designed to self-replicate pre-designed 2D rectangular regions assembled from tiles. Then, I will proceed to discuss how this dynamically controlled tile assembly framework presents a basic computational model, similar to those that combine self-replication with evolutionary processes. In the end, I reflect upon the future directions, design challenges and interesting possible applications of dynamically controlled nucleic acid self-assembly processes.