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Multifarious assembly mixtures: Systems allowing retrieval of diverse stored structures

Significance Self-assembly has recently emerged as a powerful technique for synthesizing structures on the nano- and microscales. 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. Our work addresses a fundamental limitation of the existing approaches to self-assembly: Namely, every target structure must have its own dedicated set of components, which are programmed to assemble only that very structure. In contrast, in biological systems, the same set of components can assemble many different complexes. Inspired by this, we extend the self-assembly framework to mixtures of shared components capable of assembling distinct structures on demand. Self-assembly materials are traditionally designed so that molecular or mesoscale components form a single kind of large structure. Here, we propose a scheme to create “multifarious assembly mixtures,” which self-assemble many different large structures from a set of shared components. We show that the number of multifarious structures stored in the solution of components increases rapidly with the number of different types of components. However, each stored structure can be retrieved by tuning only a few parameters, the number of which is only weakly dependent on the size of the assembled structure. Implications for artificial and biological self-assembly are discussed.