The emerging field of DNA Mathematics

Imagine using DNA not to encode genetic information, but rather as a new nano-scale building material. What would you build with incredibly small building blocks that even assemble themselves? Robots in the blood stream? The world’s smallest circuit board? A cure for cancer? How would that work?
Right now, scientists are engineering self-assembling DNA molecules to serve emergent applications in biomolecular computing, nanoelectronics, biosensors, drug delivery systems, and organic synthesis. But in order to design these structures efficiently, they need to have good mathematical strategies. Often, the self-assembled objects, e.g. lattices or polyhedral skeletons, may be modeled as graphs. Thus, these new technologies in self-assembly are now generating fascinating and challenging new design problems for which graph theory and topology are a natural tools.
We will see some of the cutting-edge applications in DNA self-assembly and how newly developed mathematical tools can help them become reality.