Abstract # 8
Biodesign India 1.0 07-09 Oct 2010
Synopsis of Invited Talk: Manish K Gupta
DAIICT, Gujarat

Title: Self-Assembly of DNA: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract:

Self-assembly is a process by which supramolecular species form spontaneously from their components. This natural process is ubiquitous throughout the life chemistry and is observed at many places in nature such as formation of galaxies, formation of coral reefs, crystal growth, healing of wounds etc. Can we self assemble bio-molecules such as DNA at our wish? In 1980’s Ned Seeman used DNA as an ingredient to construct many interesting synthetic molecules/objects such as DNA cube, octahedron etc. In 1994 in a breakthrough experiment Adleman showed that using DNA you could solve a mathematical problem. Motivated by this in 1998 Erik Winfree of Caltech using the hardware of Seeman’s synthetic molecules and theoretical ideas of Wang tiles in computer science showed that DNA self assembly is Turing universal. This means that rather than using trial and error we can systematically generate the desired structure and also do any computation by DNA self-assembly. In 2006, Paul Rothemund at Caltech created many fascinating objects of DNA such as smiley face, map of North America etc using a kind of DNA stapler on viruses. This paved the way to a field known as DNA origami. It has been predicted that in future self-assembly will become an important discipline by combining the fields of bio-molecular computation, nano-technology, medicine and synthetic biology. In this talk we will provide an overview of this interdisciplinary subject including the challenges and opportunities that are available with a focus on a major challenge of error-control in DNA self assembly