Beyond Watson and Crick: Recent advances in the use of DNA as a building material

Paul W.K. Rothemund
California Institute of Technology

Nearly 30 years ago, Ned Seeman proposed to use DNA as a set of programmable molecular tinkertoys. His goal was to create three dimensional latticeworks for protein crystallography and scaffolds for nanoelectronic devices. Today, such crystals have been achieved---and much more. We can now fold long strands of DNA, origami-like, into any desired 2D or 3D shape, and these 100 nanometer single molecules can be decorated with nanoelectronic or nanooptical components at 5 nanometer resolution. Next questions include: How will we use these structures? How will we turn them into functional devices and integrate them with conventional microfabrication? Initial attempts to answer these questions will be discussed, including the precise positioning of DNA origami on silicon and the use of DNA origami to create a carbon nanotube field effect transistor.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Paul W.K. Rothemund is a graduate of Caltech, where he dual majored in biology and computer science. His undergraduate project in information theory was one of the first designs for a DNA computer, and became one of the first patents for DNA computation. He has a long standing interest in problems at the interface of biology, chemistry, and computer science: he would like to understand what parts of biology may be best viewed as computation and he would like to turn the process of chemical synthesis into an exercise in programming. After receiving his Ph.D. under Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, he was awarded a Beckman postdoctoral fellowship and returned to Caltech to work with professor Erik Winfree on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA. Dr. Rothemund currently continues this work as a Senior Research Associate at Caltech. He is a winner of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology, the World Technology Award for Biotechnology, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Contact information:

Paul W.K. Rothemund
Caltech MC 136-93
Pasadena, CA 91125

626-390-0438
626-584-0630
pwkr@dna.caltech.edu