El ADN: biomolécula alternativa para la construcción de nanoestructuras y materiales compuestos

El ácido desoxirribonucleico, o ADN, es una biomolécula esencial para la transferencia de la información genética en los seres vivos que residen en el planeta. Las propiedades fisicoquímicas de este ácido nucleico tales como ionización de las bases heterocíclicas y la formación de puentes de hidrógeno entre bases complementarias, han atraído la atención de investigadores para la construcción de estructuras a nivel nanométrico. Una breve revisión de los trabajos reportados sobre este tema, así como la presentación de resultados recientes en la síntesis de nanoestructuras metálicas, mediante este biopolímero, son abordadas en este reporte. Desde la propuesta inicial de utilizar el ADN para producir nanoestructuras por uniones de sus cadenas, hace sólo unas décadas, hasta el diseño y desarrollo de nanomateriales basados en ADN, son presentados y discutidos, proponiendo al final una perspectiva de la tendencia de las líneas de investigación relacionadas.Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is an essential biomolecule for the genetic information transfer in living organisms, which reside in Earth. Physicochemical properties of this nucleic acid, such as heterocyclical bases ionization and hydrogen bonds interactions between complementary bases, have attracted the attention of researchers for construction of structures, at the nanometric level. A brief review on the reported works about this topic, as well as presentation of recent results in synthesis of metallic nanostructures by this polimer, are presented. From the initial proposal to employ DNA to produce nanostructures by the chains union, some decades ago, to the nanomaterials design and development based on DNA, are presented and discussed. Finally, the perspective to future trends for these research areas is mentioned

DNA-based computation times

Speed of computation and power consumption are the two main parameters of conventional computing devices implemented in microelectronic circuits. As performance of such devices approaches physical limits, new computing paradigms are emerging. Two paradigms receiving great attention are quantum and DNA-based molecular computing. This paper focuses on DNA-based computing. This paradigm can be abstracted to growth models where computational elements called tiles are self-assembled one by one, subject to some simple hierarchical rules, to fill a given template encoding a Boolean formula. While DNA-based computational devices are known to be extremely energy efficient, little is known concerning the fundamental question of computation times. In particular, given a function, we study the time required to determine its value for a given input. In the simplest instance, the analysis has interesting connections with interacting particle systems and variational problems.