DNA Origami Seeds Control Complex Nucleation Processes

ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — The construction of complex man-made objects--a car, for example, or even a pizza--almost invariably entails what are known as "top-down" processes, in which the structure and order of the thing being built is imposed from the outside (say, by an automobile assembly line, or the hands of the pizza maker).

"Top-down approaches have been extremely successful," says Erik Winfree of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "But as the object being manufactured requires higher and higher precision--such as silicon chips with smaller and smaller transistors--they require enormously expensive factories to be built."

The alternative to top-down manufacturing is a "bottom-up" approach, in which the order is imposed from within the object being made, so that it "grows" according to some built-in design.

"Flowers, dogs, and just about all biological objects are created from the bottom up," says Winfree, an associate professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering at Caltech. Along with his coworkers, Winfree is seeking to integrate bottom-up construction approaches with molecular fabrication processes to construct objects from parts that are just a few billionths of a meter in size that essentially assemble themselves.

More on this at ScienceDaily.com.