ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Robust self-replication of combinatorial information via crystal growth and scission.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer.Nature · 2026Article
- Fuel-Driven Catalytic Molecular Templating.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- The cardiac pacemakers: A paradigm of robustness in evolutionary biology.The Journal of physiology · 2026Review
- The principles of systems biology.Experimental physiology · 2026Review
- Evolutionary features in a minimal physical system: Diversity, selection, growth, inheritance, and adaptation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Information propagation through enzyme-free catalytic templating of DNA dimerization with weak product inhibition.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- An enzyme-based approach for highly efficient self-replication of DNA origami dimers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cross-chiral exponential amplification of an RNA enzyme.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Enzyme-Free Exponential Amplification via Growth and Scission of Crisscross Ribbons from Single-Stranded DNA Components.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Recent Advances in DNA Origami-Engineered Nanomaterials and Applications.Chemical reviews · 2023Review
- Prime factorization via localized tile assembly in a DNA origami framework.Science advances · 2023Article
- DNA and the origins of life in micaceous clay.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Growth Rate and Thermal Properties of DNA Origami Filaments.Nano letters · 2022Article
- Mutations in artificial self-replicating tiles: A step toward Darwinian evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Microchemomechanical devices using DNA hybridization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Robust nucleation control via crisscross polymerization of highly coordinated DNA slats.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Constructing Large 2D Lattices Out of DNA-Tiles.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- tRNA sequences can assemble into a replicator.eLife · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 mechanism, crystal growth and scission, can accurately replicate chemical sequences without enzymes. Crystal growth propagates a sequence of bits while mechanically-induced scission creates new growth fronts. Together, these processes exponentially increase the number of crystal sequences. In the system we describe, sequences are arrangements of DNA tile monomers within ribbon-shaped crystals. 99.98% of bits are copied correctly and 78% of 4-bit sequences are correct after two generations; roughly 40 sequence copies are made per growth front per generation. In principle, this process is accurate enough for 1,000-fold replication of 4-bit sequences with 50% yield, replication of longer sequences, and darwinian evolution. We thus demonstrate that neither enzymes nor covalent bond formation are required for robust chemical sequence replication. The form of the replicated information is also compatible with the replication and evolution of a wide class of materials with precise nanoscale geometry such as plasmonic nanostructures or heterogeneous protein assemblies.
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