| Monday, January 18th, 2016 | 4pm-5pm | Burnside 1205 |
University of British Columbia
On folding pathways, recycling, and reversible programming
DNA programs execute when sets of interacting molecules follow specific folding pathways, i.e., sequences of secondary structures. Longer pathways imply longer and thus potentially more complex computations. This motivates the question: is it possible to design a single DNA strand, or set of interacting DNA strands, that follow a folding pathway whose length significantly exceeds the total length of the participating molecules? We'll describe some progress on this problem and connections with the theory of reversible, energy-efficient computing.