Combining self-healing and proofreading in self-assembly

Abstract

Molecular self-assembly is a promising approach to bottom-up fabrication of complex structures. A major impediment to the practical use of self-assembly to create complex structures is the high rate of error under existing experimental conditions. Recent theoretical work on algorithmic self-assembly has shown that under a realistic model of tile addition and detachment, error correcting tile sets are possible that can recover from the attachment of incorrect tiles during the assembly process. An orthogonal type of error correction was recently considered as well: whether damage to a completed structure can be repaired. It was shown that such self-healing tile sets are possible. However, these tile sets are not robust to the incorporation of incorrect tiles. It remained an open question whether it is possible to create tile sets that can simultaneously resist wholesale removal of tiles and the incorporation of incorrect ones. Here we present a method for converting a tile set producing a pattern on the quarter plane into a tile set that makes the same pattern (at a larger scale) but is able to withstand both of these types of errors.