Self Assembly With DNA, RNA And Much More

 

Self Assembly With DNA, RNA And Much More

 

Date: 10^th April, 2026 (Friday)

Time: 12 - 12:50 pm (HKT)

 

Venue: Lecture Theatre P2, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building

 

 

Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics

University of Oxford

 

Ard Louis is a theoretical physicist with a broad interdisciplinary set of interests, including self-assembling DNA, theories of evolution, the dynamics of soft matter, machine learning and applications of algorithmic information theory. He happily collaborates with biologists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians. After his first degree in physics from the University of Utrecht, he completed a PhD with Neil Ashcroft at Cornell. He was a Royal Society Research Fellow in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford.

 

Self-assembly is one of nature’s great conjuring tricks: exquisite structures arise by spontaneously organising themselves into complex wholes. From crystals to cells, order emerges because the pieces themselves carry instructions for how to fit together. This begs the question, how do we best emulate these principles with nanotechnology? DNA is possibly the best studied material for artificial self-assembly because its interactions are programmable and highly specific, allowing researchers to design remarkable nanoscale structures, including walkers that walk along tracks, boxes that open and close, and even DNA based computers that mimic neural network.

 

In this talk, I will introduce OxDNA (https://dna.physics.ox.ac.uk/) a computational model that distils DNA down to its essential physical behaviors while remaining simple enough to simulate, making it the most-used coarse-grained model for studying DNA self-assembly. With oxDNA, we can watch self-assembly unfold, see where it goes wrong, and understand why certain designs succeed while others fail. I will also discuss recent extensions DNA-RNA hybrids, where we discovered a remarkably strong effect of sequence ordering on the rates of toe-hold mediated strand-displacement, an effect that has recently been verified by experiments, both in-vitro, and in CRISPR-Cas9.

 

Finally, if time permits, I will present a general algorithmic framework for the design of self-assembling systems, which explains why symmetric systems are easier to design (and evolve) than a-symmetric ones.

 

- - ALL ARE WELCOME - -