Design and simulation of self-repairing DNA lattices

Self-repair is essential to all living systems, providing the ability to remain functional in spite of gradual damage. In the context of self-assembly of self-repairing synthetic biomolecular systems, recently Winfree developed a method for transforming a set of DNA tiles into its self-healing counterpart at the cost of increasing the lattice area by a factor of 25. The overall focus of this paper, however, is to develop compact designs for self-repairing tiling assemblies with reasonable constraints on crystal growth. Specifically, we use a special class of DNA tiling designs called reversible tiling which when carefully designed can provide inherent self-repairing capabilities to patterned DNA lattices. We further note that we can transform any irreversible computational DNA tile set to its reversible counterpart and hence improve the self-repairability of the computational lattice. But doing the transform with an optimal number of tiles, is still an open question. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.

Duke Scholars

Author John H. Reif Computer Science