A major goal of natural computing is to design biomolecules, such as nucleic acid sequences, that can be used to perform computations. We design sequences of nucleic acids that are “guaranteed” to have long folding pathways relative to their length. This particular sequences with high probability follow low-barrier folding pathways that visit a large number of distinct structures. Long folding pathways are interesting, because they demonstrate that natural computing can potentially support long and complex computations. Formally, we provide the first scalable designs of molecules whose low-barrier folding pathways, with respect to a simple, stacked pair energy model, grow superlinearly with the molecule length, but for which all significantly shorter alternative folding pathways have an energy barrier that is \(2 - \epsilon \) times that of the low-barrier pathway for any \(\epsilon > 0\) and a sufficiently long sequence.

中文翻译：

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具有长的低屏障折叠途径的核酸链的设计。

自然计算的主要目标是设计可用于执行计算的生物分子，例如核酸序列。我们设计了“保证”相对于其长度具有长折叠路径的核酸序列。这种特定的序列很有可能遵循低障碍折叠途径，该途径访问了大量不同的结构。长折叠路径很有趣，因为它们表明自然计算可以潜在地支持长而复杂的计算。形式上，我们提供分子的第一个可扩展设计，其低势垒折叠路径（相对于简单的堆积对能量模型）随分子长度超线性增长，但对于所有明显较短的替代折叠路径，其能量垒为对于任何\（\ epsilon> 0 \）和足够长的序列，\（2-\ epsilon \）乘以低势垒路径的时间。