Activatable Tiles: Compact, Robust Programmable Assembly and Other Applications

While algorithmic DNA self-assembly is, in theory, capable of forming complex patterns, its experimental demonstration has been limited by significant assembly errors. In this paper we describe a novel protection/deprotection strategy to strictly enforce the direction of tiling assembly growth to ensure the robustness of the assembly process. Tiles are initially inactive, meaning that each tile’s output pads are protected and cannot bind with other tiles. After other tiles bind to the tile’s input pads, the tile transitions to an active state and its output pads are exposed, allowing growth. We describe abstract and kinetic models of activatable tile assembly and show that the error rate can be decreased significantly with respect to Winfree’s original kinetic tile assembly model without considerable decrease in assembly growth speed. We prove that an activatable tile set is an example of a compact, error-resilient and self-healing tile-set. We describe a DNA design of activat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DNA
• Authors: Urmi Majumder, Thomas H. LaBean, John H. Reif
• Keywords: Activatable Tiles, Assembly Growth, DNA 2007, Tile Assembly