A Neuron Survival Protein May Give Directions, Too 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Research Digest Synopses of Research Articles Using Biology to Create Complex Patterns DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020448 In his seminal exploration of the properties of living organisms, What Is Life?, Erwin Schroedinger concluded that life depends in large part on storing and processing information. For genetic material to carry the diverse instructions required for living processes, he proposed, it must be stored in an aperiodic crystal. Just nine years later, it was clear that DNA is indeed an aperiodic crystal and that genetic information is conveyed through this irregular pattern. Much like computers, biological systems are programmed to follow a precise set of rules, or algorithms, to store information and solve problems.These biological new study, Rothemund and colleagues use DNA to show that crystal growth can be programmed to create speci?c aperiodic patterns. Inspired by a model of crystal growth as a computational process, they have programmed DNA molecules to act as molecular building blocks, arranging themselves according to local rules that in turn create a complex global pattern.The resulting two-dimensional structures, which self- assemble from knotted DNA complexes (called tiles), grow to create a fractal pattern known as a Sierpinski triangle. “sticky ends”whose sequence was complementary to the sticky ends of tiles it should stick to. Each tile was either white (0) or black (1): a black tile can ?t at any site where the two neighboring tiles are opposite colors, while a white tile can ?t at any site where the two neighboring tiles are the same color. Logically, the new tile’s color is the exclusive-or (XOR) of the tiles in the previous layer. That such logical layer-by-layer iteration of XOR computations will produce the Sierpinski triangle is well known.What’s remarkable is that DNA molecules can be programmed to grow according to this logic.With this programmable algorithmic crystal, Rothemund and algo