US scientists near development of self-replicating materials

The scientists claim they have developed artificial structures that can self replicate — a process that has the potential to yield new types of materials.

‘This is the first step in the process of creating artificial self-replicating materials of an arbitrary composition,’ said Paul Chaikin, a professor within New York University’s (NYU’s) physics department and one of the study’s co-authors.

The results of the research could lead to the first steps towards a general process for the self replication of a wide variety of arbitrarily designed seeds, which are made from DNA tile motifs that serve as letters arranged to spell out a particular word.

The replication process preserves the letter sequence and the shape of the seed and hence the information required to produce further generations.

In the natural world, the DNA replication process involves complementary matches between bases — adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T) and guanine (G) pairs with cytosine (C) — to form its familiar double helix. By contrast, the NYU researchers developed an artificial tile or motif called BTX (bent triple-helix molecules containing three DNA double helices), with each BTX molecule composed of 10 DNA strands.