New York University researchers have created webs of DNA, which made copies of themselves. This is a step towards self-replication in materials fabrication.

They designed tile motifs so they formed a seven-tile seed sequence. They then used the seeds to instruct the formation of a first generation of complementary seven-tile daughter sequences. And finally, they used the daughters to instruct the formation of seven-tile granddaughter sequences identical to the initial seed sequences.

Ref.: Tong Wang et al., Self-replication of information-bearing nanoscale patterns, Nature, 478, 225–228 (13 October 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10500