April 2, 2021

About the speaker

Timothy Gomez is a graduate student in the department of computer science at UTRGV. He received the Presidential Graduate Research Assistantship during his masters.

Molecular Computation: Self-Assembling Tile Computers

Self-Assembly is the process by simple pieces autonomously come together to form larger more complex structures. This can be seen throughout nature such as in DNA where nucleotides may attach to their complimentary base pair. Molecular Computation is an area of computation that utilizes the natural behavior of molecular structures such as DNA to perform interesting tasks. However there exists many biological and physical details that complicate the design of these systems. Abstracted computational models are created to allow for more focus on the relevant computational properties of self assembly. In many popular molecular computational models DNA branch junction molecules are abstracted as square tiles with sticky ends. Using these models we are able to design Tile Assembly Computers by encoding the program and input within this set of tiles.