Materials Science and Engineering Commons^™

Availability: A Metric For Nucleic Acid Strand Displacement Systems, Xiaoping Olson, Shohei Kotani, Jennifer E. Padilla, Natalya Hallstrom, Sara Goltry, Jeunghoon Lee, Bernard Yurke, William L. Hughes, Elton Graugnard

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

DNA strand displacement systems have transformative potential in synthetic biology. While powerful examples have been reported in DNA nanotechnology, such systems are plagued by leakage, which limits network stability, sensitivity, and scalability. An approach to mitigate leakage in DNA nanotechnology, which is applicable to synthetic biology, is to introduce mismatches to complementary fuel sequences at key locations. However, this method overlooks nuances in the secondary structure of the fuel and substrate that impact the leakage reaction kinetics in strand displacement systems. In an effort to quantify the impact of secondary structure on leakage, we introduce the concepts of availability and …