Abstract
Self-assembly is a process which is ubiquitous in natural, especially biological systems. It occurs when groups of relatively simple components spontaneously combine to form more complex structures. While such systems have inspired a large amount of research into designing theoretical models of self-assembling systems, and even laboratory-based implementations of them, these artificial models and systems often tend to be lacking in one of the powerful features of natural systems (e.g. the assembly and folding of proteins), namely the dynamic reconfigurability of structures. In this paper, we present a new mathematical model of self-assembly, based on the abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM), called the Flexible Tile Assembly Model (FTAM). In the FTAM, the individual components are 2-dimensional square tiles as in the aTAM, but in the FTAM, bonds between the edges of tiles can be flexible, allowing bonds to flex and entire structures to reconfigure, thus allowing 2-dimensional components to form 3-dimensional structures. We analyze the powers and limitations of FTAM systems by (1) demonstrating how flexibility can be controlled to carefully build desired structures, and (2) showing how flexibility can be beneficially harnessed to form structures which can “efficiently” reconfigure into many different configurations and/or greatly varying configurations. We also show that with such power comes a heavy burden in terms of computational complexity of simulation and prediction by proving that, for important properties of FTAM systems, determining their existence is intractable, even for properties which are easily computed for systems in less dynamic models.
M. J. Patitz and M. Sharp—This author’s research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants CCF-1422152 and CAREER-1553166.
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Notes
- 1.
We refer to the vectors \(\{(1,0,0),(-1,0,0),(0,1,0),(0,-1,0),(0,0,1),(0,0,-1)\})\) by the shorthand notation \(\{+x,-x,+y,-y,+z,-z\}\) throughout this paper.
- 2.
Non-overlapping placements refer to different tile locations. Formally, two tile placements are non-overlapping if (1) \(l != l'\) or (2) \(n != n'\) and \(n!=\texttt {inverse}(n')\).
- 3.
Note that any glue can only bind to a single other glue. Also, we do not allow two pairs of coplanar tiles to bind through the same space (i.e. the two partial surfaces created by two pairs of bounded coplanar tiles are not allowed to intersect). Therefore, 4 glues from 4 different tiles that are all adjacent to each other can all form bonds only if they form two flexible bonds in non-straight orientations.
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Durand-Lose, J., Hendricks, J., Patitz, M.J., Perkins, I., Sharp, M. (2018). Self-assembly of 3-D Structures Using 2-D Folding Tiles. In: Doty, D., Dietz, H. (eds) DNA Computing and Molecular Programming. DNA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11145. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00030-1_7
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