The self-assembly of umbrella-shaped mesogens is explored with subphthalocyanine cores and oligo(thienyl) arms different lengths in the light their application as light-harvesting photoconducting materials. While shortest arm derivatives self-assemble a conventional columnar phase single mesogen repeating unit, more extended generate dimers that pile up into liquid crystalline columns. In contr...

This unit describes how to use the Parallel Contig Assembly Program (PCAP) to assemble the data produced by a whole-genome shotgun sequencing project. We present a basic protocol for using PCAP on a multiprocessor computer in a 300-Mb genome assembly project. A support protocol to prepare input files for PCAP is also described. Another basic protocol for using PCAP on a distributed cluster of c...

The development of synthetic biology requires rapid batch construction of large gene networks from combinations of smaller units. Despite the availability of computational predictions for well-characterized enzymes, the optimization of most synthetic biology projects requires combinational constructions and tests. A new building-brick-style parallel DNA assembly framework for simple and flexibl...

DNA repair in the eukaryotic cell disrupts local chromatin organization. To investigate whether the resetting of nucleosomal arrays can be linked to the repair process, we developed model systems, with both Xenopus egg extract and human cell extracts, to follow repair and chromatin assembly in parallel on circular DNA templates. Both systems were able to carry out nucleotide excision repair of ...

Fully automating the assembly of laser systems puts high demands on the accuracy, but alike on the flexibility and adaptivity of the assembly system. In this paper a concept for a flexible robot-based precision assembly is introduced. This concept is based on a modular 6-axis alignment tool which has been designed as a hybrid serial-parallel manipulator with flexures for all revolute and spheri...

One common problem associated with automatic assembly systems is that some assembly operations may have relatively long cycle times. As a consequence, the productivity, as determined by the operations with the longest cycle time, can be significantly reduced. Therefore, a special form of parallel workstation known as a highlift station was developed to improve the performance of an automatic as...

Recent results of corpus-based linguistics demonstrate that context-appropriate sentences can be generated by a stochastic constraint satisfaction process. Exploiting the similarity of constraint satisfaction and DNA self-assembly, we explore a DNA assembly model of sentence generation. The words and phrases in a language corpus are encoded as DNA molecules to build a language model of the corp...