Practical design of molecular self-assembly systems due to cotranscriptional folding and optimization

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16H05854
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (A)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Theory of informatics
• Research Institution: The University of Electro-Communications
• Principal Investigator: Seki Shinnosuke 電気通信大学, 大学院情報理工学研究科, 助教 (30624944)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: Cotranscriptiona folding / 分子自己組織化 / 折り畳みシステム / 計算複雑性

Outline of Final Research Achievements

An RNA sequence (transcript) folds upon itself into a tertiary structure while being synthesized out of its template DNA sequence on a gene. This phenomenon is called cotranscriptional folding (CF). Geary et al. demonstrated a design of template sequence whose transcript cotranscriptionally folds into a target RNA tile structure highly likely.
In this research project, we proposed the oritatami system (OS) as a mathematical model of CF, and studied the potential of OS to yield structures as well as the computational complexity of several problems on the OS design. One of the important result is the design and implementation of OS that counts in binary. This counter OS is of use to control the size of the target structure to be folded. It turned out to be quite useful also to generate a fractal-like structure, whose folding requires a simple computation like counting inherently.

Free Research Field

分子自己組織化理論