Designing the self-assembly of arbitrary shapes using minimal complexity building blocks

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel pipeline for designing self-assembled structures with minimal types of building blocks, analyzing their assembly dynamics, and demonstrating their practical realization with DNA nanostructures.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new design pipeline for minimal-component self-assembly and analyze its efficiency and versatility compared to more complex solutions.

Findings

Minimal building block sets can assemble structures as effectively as unique-component designs.

Assembly speed and yield are comparable or better with resource-efficient solutions.

Multifaceted structures can be designed with shared components across different targets.

Abstract

The design space for a self-assembled multicomponent objects ranges from a solution in which every building block is unique to one with the minimum number of distinct building blocks that unambiguously define the target structure. Using a novel pipeline, we explore the design spaces for a set of structures of various sizes and complexities. To understand the implications of the different solutions, we analyse their assembly dynamics using patchy particle simulations and study the influence of the number of distinct building blocks and the angular and spatial tolerances on their interactions on the kinetics and yield of the target assembly. We show that the resource-saving solution with minimum number of distinct blocks can often assemble just as well (or faster) than designs where each building block is unique. We further use our methods to design multifarious structures, where building blocks are shared between different target structures. Finally, we use coarse-grained DNA simulations to investigate the realisation of multicomponent shapes using DNA nanostructures as building blocks.