Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27155013›Full record

ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016

Information capacity of specific interactions.

Miriam H Huntley, Arvind Murugan, Michael P Brenner

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
7citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

7 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Hierarchical self-assembly for high-yield addressable complexity at fixed conditions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. Review
  6. Article
  7. Nonequilibrium associative retrieval of multiple stored self-assembly targets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Miriam H HuntleyHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138;
Arvind MuruganHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Physics and the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637;
Michael P BrennerHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 brenner@seas.harvard.edu.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Specific interactions are a hallmark feature of self-assembly and signal-processing systems in both synthetic and biological settings. Specificity between components may arise from a wide variety of physical and chemical mechanisms in diverse contexts, from DNA hybridization to shape-sensitive depletion interactions. Despite this diversity, all systems that rely on interaction specificity operate under the constraint that increasing the number of distinct components inevitably increases off-target binding. Here we introduce "capacity," the maximal information encodable using specific interactions, to compare specificity across diverse experimental systems and to compute how specificity changes with physical parameters. Using this framework, we find that "shape" coding of interactions has higher capacity than chemical ("color") coding because the strength of off-target binding is strongly sublinear in binding-site size for shapes while being linear for colors. We also find that different specificity mechanisms, such as shape and color, can be combined in a synergistic manner, giving a capacity greater than the sum of the parts.

Indexed as

colloidcrosstalkmutual informationself-assemblyspecificity

Identifiers

PMID27155013
PMCPMC4889362

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.