Robust nucleation control via crisscross polymerization of DNA slats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Natural biomolecular assemblies such as actin filaments or microtubules polymerize in a nucleation-limited fashion 1,2 . The barrier to nucleation arises in part from chelate cooperativity, where stable capture of incoming monomers requires straddling multiple subunits on a filament end 3 . For programmable self-assembly from building blocks such as synthetic DNA 4–23 , it is likewise desirable to be able to suppress spontaneous nucleation 24–31 . However, existing approaches that exploit just a low level of cooperativity can limit spontaneous nucleation only for slow growth, near-equilibrium conditions 32 . Here we introduce ultracooperative assembly of ribbons densely woven from single-stranded DNA slats. An inbound “crisscross” slat snakes over and under six or more previously captured slats on a growing ribbon end, forming weak but specific half-duplex interactions with each. We demonstrate growth of crisscross ribbons with distinct widths and twists to lengths representing many thousands of slat additions. Strictly seed-initiated extension is attainable over a broad range of temperatures, divalent-cation concentrations, and free-slat concentrations, without unseeded ribbons arising even after a hundred hours to the limit of agarose-gel detection. We envision that crisscross assembly will be broadly enabling for all-or-nothing formation of microstructures with nanoscale features, algorithmic self-assembly, and signal amplification in diagnostic applications requiring extreme sensitivity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".