Engineering Commons^™

Robust Self-Replication Of Combinatorial Information Via Crystal Growth And Scission, Rebecca Schulman, Bernard Yurke, Erik Winfree

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Understanding how a simple chemical system can accurately replicate combinatorial information, such as a sequence, is an important question for both the study of life in the universe and for the development of evolutionary molecular design techniques. During biological sequence replication, a nucleic acid polymer serves as a template for the enzyme-catalyzed assembly of a complementary sequence. Enzymes then separate the template and complement before the next round of replication. Attempts to understand how replication could occur more simply, such as without enzymes, have largely focused on developing minimal versions of this replication process. Here we describe how a different …