Speaker:Hugh Potter

Molecular Toolchains: Design and Verification

Molecular programming is an exciting field that combines techniques from biology, chemistry, and computer science to achieve remarkable results at the molecular scale.  Humans are adept at manipulating matter at human scale: cars, skyscrapers, factories, and similar.  To engineer matter at the nanomolecular scale, however, we must often program matter to assemble itself.  We identify two challenges in this domain.  First, design complexity: the molecular formalisms that we use to design nanoscale systems are powerful but complex.  What abstractions can we create to access this power in a that is straightforward for humans to understand and reason about?  We present ALCH, an imperative language that compiles into the chemical reaction network-controlled tile assembly model.  Second, verification: if we want to use nanotechnological devices in industry and medicine, we must be able to prove that they are safe, and function as expected.  In this talk, we focus on verification via machine-checkable mathematical proofs.  We discuss two efforts to apply this technique to chemical reaction networks, and address the question of what role it has to play in molecular verification.

Committee: James Lathrop (co-major professor), Jack Lutz (co-major professor), Samik Basu, Robyn Lutz, and Stephen Gilbert.

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