Structural DNA nanotechnology has provided the first step toward a general method of creating artificial self-replicating materials of arbitrary structure and composition. A team of scientists at New York University, including Nadrian Seeman, winner of the 1995 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize, designed and fabricated a set of seven DNA tiles assembled into a specific structure that was used to seed the production of more copies of the same structure. From ScienceDaily “Self-Replication Process Holds Promise for Production of New Materials“:
New York University scientists have developed artificial structures that can self-replicate, a process that has the potential to yield new types of materials. In the natural world, self-replication is ubiquitous in all living entities, but artificial self-replication has been elusive. The new discovery is the first steps toward a general process for self-replication of a wide variety of arbitrarily designed seeds. The seeds are made from DNA tile motifs that serve as letters arranged to spell out a particular word. The replication process preserves the letter sequence and the shape of the seed and hence the information required to produce further generations. …
To read more, click here.