Virtual participation: Zoom details available here
Speaker: Dr Trent Rogers, Maynooth University
Title: "Controlling the rate of (DNA nanoscale)structure formation"
Abstract: Despite decades of work, and several major successes, unintended and often high-rate spurious (unseeded) nucleation remains a central challenge for the design of DNA tile self-assembly systems. We propose a simple, active, strand motif, called a cover, as a means to control the rate of spurious nucleation in DNA tile self-assembly systems. We demonstrate that this mechanism, combined with a novel tile motif we propose, called a core tile motif, allows us to tune the rate of spurious nucleation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using a covered core tile motif allows us to nearly suppress spurious nucleation while allowing for the seeded growth of several micron long nanotubes over a wide temperature window (6C).
Bio: I was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and graduated with my PhD in Theoretical Computer Science in 2019. While pursuing my PhD, I published 23 papers in peer-reviewed international venues, and I worked as a senior data-scientist at Walmart Inc. Since graduating, I have worked in the Hamilton Institute where I perform experiments with the goal of realizing self-assembling systems from DNA molecules.