Priya Vashishta?PI, Rajiv K. Kalia, Aiichiro Nakano (University of Southern California) Ananth Grama (Purdue University)
DNA translocation through solid-state nanopores and nanofluidic channels underlie ?lab-on-a-chip? technology and solid-state nanopore ?microscopy? for molecular structure and high-speed sequencing. Highly efficient methods for directed self-assembly of DNA offer unprecedented opportunities for the synthesis of novel genes, chromosome mapping, biosensors, molecular machines, nanoelectronics and nanomechanical systems, and formulations of mesoscopic structural motifs as building blocks of emerging periodic and aperiodic nanostructures consisting of DNAs. This project involves the study of DNA self-assembly and translocation through nanometer-scale pores in silica and silicon nitride membranes using a predictive hierarchical petascale simulation framework consisting of: (1) Highly accurate quantum mechanical (QM) simulations to describe chemical processes in DNA translocation and concatenation; (2) multibillion-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for structural properties and dynamical processes of DNAs in confined fluidic environments, with interatomic interactions validated by QM calculations and key experiments; (3) hybrid MD and adaptive lattice Boltzmann (LB) simulations in which MD is embedded in translocation/concatenation regions, and LB in the rest of the fluid; (4) accelerated dynamics approaches to reach macroscopic time scales for direct comparison with experimental data; (5) metascalable, self-tuning, multicore parallel simulation algorithms; and (6) automated model transitioning to embed higher fidelity simulations inside coarser simulations on demand with controlled error propagation. A metascalable (or ?design once, scale on new architectures?) parallel application-development framework is also being developed for first-principles simulations of directed DNA self-assembly.
