Fault-Tolerance in Biochemical Systems

Biochemistry is messy. It's a miracle any of it works. And yet it does. The wonderful diversity and amazing talents of living things derive from the biochemical processes that copy genetic information and use that information as a program to construct a sophisticated organization of matter and behaviour – reliably and robustly overcoming insult after insult from the environment. In this talk I will first discuss how known techniques for fault-tolerant computing, such as von Neumann's multiplexing technique for digital circuits, can be translated to the biochemical context. I will then discuss fault-tolerance in molecular self-assembly, which requires new techniques. Using a model of algorithmic self-assembly, a generalization of crystal growth processes, I will present techniques for controlling the nucleation of self-assembly, for reducing errors during growth, and for recovering after gross damage or fragmentation.