Conformational switching in self-assembling mechanical systems

A study of 1D self-assembly of a type of mechanical conformational switches, minus devices is presented where assembly occurs via the sequential mating of a random pair of parts selected from a part bin, referred to as sequential random bin-picking. The minus devices facilitate the robust yield of a desired assembly against the variation in the initial fraction of the part types, by specifying a fixed assembly sequence during the self-assembling process. It is also found that while the minus devices can "encode" some assembly sequences, encoding other assembly sequences requires the use of another type of conformational switches, plus devices. It is proved that the local rules corresponding to the minus and plus devices, and three conformations per each component, can encode any assembly sequences of a 1D assembly of distinct components with arbitrary length.