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

  • Authors:
  • Rebecca Schulman

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

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 field 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.