Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Selectivity And Reducing The Leakage Of Dna Strand Displacement Systems, Shohei Kotani

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Because of the elegance of Watson-Crick base pairing and the programmability of toehold-mediated strand displacement, DNA is a model material for designing, building, and testing molecular assemblies. DNA assemblies are categorized as structural when they are at thermodynamic equilibrium and dynamic when they are not. Through programmed perturbations, metastable assemblies perform physical, chemical, and computational work. When integrated into a diagnostic package, disease-specific nucleic acid sequences can be identified, amplified, and analyzed via standard DNA nanotechnology rules. In order for these rules to make an impact, two critical challenges in the field have been undertaken in this dissertation. First, the …