The effect of malformed tiles on tile assemblies within the kinetic tile assembly model

Many different constructions of proofreading tile sets have been proposed in the literature to reduce the effect of deviations from ideal behaviour of the dynamics of the molecular tile self-assembly process. In this paper, we consider the effect on the tile assembly process of a different kind of non-ideality, namely, imperfections in the tiles themselves. We assume a scenario in which some small proportion of the tiles in a tile set are “malformed”. We study, through simulations, the effect of such malformed tiles on the selfassembly process within the kinetic Tile Assembly Model (kTAM). Our simulation results show that some tile set constructions show greater error-resilience in the presence of malformed tiles than others. For example, the 2- and 3-way overlay compact proofreading tile sets of Reif et al. (2005) are able to handle malformed tiles quite well. On the other hand, the snaked proofreading tile set of Chen and Goel (2005) fails to form even moderately-sized tile assem...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: NC
• Authors: Ya Meng, Navin Kashyap
• Keywords: Malformed Tiles, NC 2011, Neural Networks, Tile, Tile Sets