Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Beyond biology: designing a new mechanism for self-replication and evolution at the nanoscale

Beyond biology: designing a new mechanism for self-replication and evolution at the nanoscale Beyond Biology Designing a New Mechanism for Self-Replication and Evolution at the Nanoscale Rebecca Schulman, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, rschulm3@jhu.edu As biology demonstrates, evolutionary algorithms are an extraordinarily powerful way to design complex nanoscale systems. While we can harness the biological apparatus for replicating and selecting DNA sequences to evolve enzymes and to some extent, organisms, we would like to build replication machinery that would allow us to evolve designs for a much wider variety of materials and systems. Here we describe work that uses techniques from the new eld of structural DNA nanotechnology to modularly design nanoscale components that together can be assembled into a system for self-replicating a new form of chemical information or genome, and thus for evolving a new type of chemical sequence. These features are essential to the capacity of biology for self-replication, self-healing and metamorphosis. By having similar control over molecular synthesis and nanoscale geometry in synthetic systems, it should be possible to achieve these features as well as many others in synthetic materials. Biology ™s sophisticated architecture is the product of the Darwinian evolution of a genomic sequence, an organism ™s program for growth and function. Evolution is http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGEVOlution Association for Computing Machinery

Beyond biology: designing a new mechanism for self-replication and evolution at the nanoscale

ACM SIGEVOlution , Volume 5 (4) – Nov 1, 2011

Loading next page...
 
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/beyond-biology-designing-a-new-mechanism-for-self-replication-and-VIN53EL20z

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1931-8499
DOI
10.1145/2078245.2078248
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Beyond Biology Designing a New Mechanism for Self-Replication and Evolution at the Nanoscale Rebecca Schulman, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, rschulm3@jhu.edu As biology demonstrates, evolutionary algorithms are an extraordinarily powerful way to design complex nanoscale systems. While we can harness the biological apparatus for replicating and selecting DNA sequences to evolve enzymes and to some extent, organisms, we would like to build replication machinery that would allow us to evolve designs for a much wider variety of materials and systems. Here we describe work that uses techniques from the new eld of structural DNA nanotechnology to modularly design nanoscale components that together can be assembled into a system for self-replicating a new form of chemical information or genome, and thus for evolving a new type of chemical sequence. These features are essential to the capacity of biology for self-replication, self-healing and metamorphosis. By having similar control over molecular synthesis and nanoscale geometry in synthetic systems, it should be possible to achieve these features as well as many others in synthetic materials. Biology ™s sophisticated architecture is the product of the Darwinian evolution of a genomic sequence, an organism ™s program for growth and function. Evolution is

Journal

ACM SIGEVOlutionAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Nov 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.