From MPPWiki

Title: Programming Nucleic Acids Self-Assembly

• Peng Yin, Harvard University

Abstract

We will discuss in this talk our group's research on engineering information directed self-assembly of nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) structures and devices, and on exploiting such systems to do useful molecular work. Such de novo designed systems are composed of small synthetic monomers capable of conditional configuration change and can be programmed to self-assemble, move, and compute. They can potentially serve as programmable controllers for the spatial arrangement and re-arrangement of diverse functional molecules (e.g. fluorophores, proteins), which will enable us to develop applications in imaging, sensing, diagnostics, and therapeutics. We will discuss our recent progress in engineering novel molecular mechanisms for structure formation and pathway programming, and in application development.