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Title: Litters of self-replicating origami cross-tiles

Self-replication and exponential growth are ubiquitous in nature but until recently there were few examples of artificial self-replication. Often replication is a templated process where a parent produces a single offspring, doubling the population in each generation. Many species however produce more than one offspring at a time, enabling faster population growth and higher probability of species perpetuation. We have made a system of cross-shaped origami tiles that yields a number of offspring, four to eight or more, depending on the concentration of monomer units to be assembled. The parent dimer template serves as a seed to crystallize a one-dimensional crystal, a ladder. The ladder rungs are then UV–cross-linked and the offspring are then released by heating, to yield a litter of autonomous daughters. In the complement study, we also optimize the growth conditions to speed up the process and yield a 103increase in the growth rate for the single-offspring replication system. Self-replication and exponential growth of autonomous motifs is useful for fundamental studies of selection and evolution as well as for materials design, fabrication, and directed evolution. Methods that increase the growth rate, the primary evolutionary drive, not only speed up experiments but provide additional mechanisms for evolving materials toward desired functionalities.

 
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NSF-PAR ID:
10083805
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume:
116
Issue:
6
ISSN:
0027-8424
Page Range / eLocation ID:
p. 1952-1957
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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