Memories in a jar

Self-assembly has emerged as a powerful technique for synthesizing structures on the nano and micro-scale. The basis of this development is the use of biopolymers, like DNA, to design specific interactions between multiple species of components, allowing the spontaneous assembly of complex structures. Inspired by biological systems, where the same set of components can assemble many different complexes, we can design mixtures of shared components that have memory of many distinct structures and are capable of assembling each at will. Moreover, these structures can transition one to another when an appropriate switch is triggered. In this talk I will discuss examples of memories modeled as structures made of DNA coated colloidal particles.