Stable Polyhedral Self-Assembly by Dimers

Meeting Details

For more information about this meeting, contact Carina Curto, Timothy Reluga.

Speaker: Tomo Pisanski, University of Primorska and University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
(Host: Carina Curto)

Abstract: Recently synthetic biologists began designing polypeptide strands that can self-assemble in the shape of a stable polyhedron in such a way that each polyhedral edge is com- posed of two intertwined polypeptide segments. The model that best describes a self-assembly polyhedron comes from topological graph theory. It can be interpreted, on the one hand, as a gluing process turning a fundamental polygon into a closed surface and on the other hand, as an Eulerian trail in a doubled skeleton graph of the corresponding polyhedron. Several mathematical questions are addressed, such as existence, uniqueness and enumeration. Determining optimal gluing sequence can be considered as a problem of combinatorial optimization. The problem of multi strand self-assembly is also considered with emphasis on vertex-stability. The method can be applied not only to proteins but also to certain DNA self-assemblies.

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Room Reservation Information

Room Number: 106 McAllister

Date: 04/21/2015

Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm