A Simple DNA Gate Motif for Synthesizing Large-Scale Circuits

The prospects of programming molecular systems to perform complex autonomous tasks has motivated research into the design of synthetic biochemical circuits. Of particular interest to us are cell-free nucleic acid systems that exploit non-covalent hybridization and strand displacement reactions to create cascades that implement digital and analog circuits. To date, circuits involving at most tens of gates have been demonstrated experimentally. Here, we propose a DNA catalytic gate architecture that we believe is suitable for practical synthesis of large-scale circuits involving possibly thousands of gates. We will review the current status of experimental implementations, suggest their future prospects, and discuss progress on developing a compiler that converts VHDL programs to sequences for DNA molecules. Biography Lulu Qian is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Erik Winfree's lab at Caltech. She received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Southeast University of China in 2002, and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DNA
• Authors: Lulu Qian, Erik Winfree
• Keywords: Bioinformatics, DNA 2008, DNA Catalytic Gate, DNA Circuits, Synthetic Biochemical Circuits