Increasing Redundancy Exponentially Reduces Error Rates during Algorithmic Self-Assembly

Published on: 2015/05/12

Abstract

Everyone makes mistakes. That applies to molecules too: during self-assembly, for example, sometimes the wrong molecule arrives at the wrong place, and sticks -- resulting in the growth of an ill-formed structure. But there's a solution: double check, triple check, quadruple check. In DNA tile self-assembly theory, there is a natural way to do this, using proofreading tile sets. Here we demonstrate, experimentally, that assembly error rates decrease exponentially with molecular designs that allow increased levels of proofreading.

Authors

Rebecca Schulman, Christina Wright, and Erik Winfree

File

Increasing Redundancy Exponentially Reduces Error Rates during Algorithmic Self-Assembly.pdf