What if material structures could ‘build themselves’ by self-assembling their molecules — guided by ‘artificial intelligence’? It sounds like science fiction, but making this possible is now the serious research aim for computer scientists, physicists, chemists and nanotechnology experts, all working in collaboration at The University of Nottingham.
Two centuries after Charles Darwin published his most famous work, On The Origin of Species, researchers plan to apply evolutionary principles and insights gained from computational theory to develop algorithms that guide the creation of new chemical structures at a molecular level.
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has provided nearly £1m to fund this research. Using advances in computer science and state-of-the-art microscopy, which will monitor and encourage self-assembly, academics from fields bridging computing and the physical sciences will join forces to understand, develop and control molecular ‘self-assembly’.
‘Evolutionary Optimisation of Self Assembling Nano-Designs’ — ExIStENcE — is the brainchild of Dr Natalio Krasnogor (Reader in Interdisciplinary Computer Science) and leader of the Interdisciplinary Optimisation Laboratory, Professors Philip Moriarty and Peter Beton from the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Professor Neil Champness from the School of Chemistry.
“Self-Assembly is one of nature’s most powerful and pervasively used engineering mechanisms,” says Dr Krasnogor. “In fact life would not be possible without it. At the core of our approach lies the assumption that self-assembly can be understood as an information-driven process and hence be better exploited by directly linking it to computational phenomena.”
“A deeper understanding of the fundamentals of molecular self-assembly, all the way up to the self-organisation of biological entities, would profoundly affect the way our species builds and controls synthetic as well as natural systems.”
In a nutshell, ‘self-assembly’ is the process by which a certain structure or organisation emerges from the mutual interaction amongst the structure’s building blocks (eg. molecules, robotic parts, parts of computer programs, cells, etc) and between these building blocks and the environment in which they exist.
The magic of this team’s approach is in the fact that nobody will do the building of the structure or organisation except the environment and the components themselves. “No master puppeteer will instruct the components when and where to go!”
Natalio Krasnogor has already worked with biologists on bioinformatics, systems and synthetic biology. This latest collaboration will create a team of 10 researchers to develop novel evolutionary algorithms (EAs) and protocols based on deeper principles than currently available for the optimisation, design and exploitation of molecular self-assembly. Dr Krasnogor and his project partners are now beginning to recruit postdoctoral researchers to strengthen the interdisciplinary make-up of the team.
Posted at 09:22:00 on 26th October 2009