Volume 132, Issue 35 pp. 15089-15095
Forschungsartikel

Fuzzy DNA Strand Displacement: A Strategy to Decrease the Complexity of DNA Network Design

Zhiyu Wang

Zhiyu Wang

Key Laboratory of Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control of Education Ministry of China, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430074 China

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Yingxin Hu

Yingxin Hu

Key Laboratory of Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control of Education Ministry of China, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430074 China

College of Information Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang, 050043 China

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Prof. Dr. Linqiang Pan

Corresponding Author

Prof. Dr. Linqiang Pan

Key Laboratory of Image Information Processing and Intelligent Control of Education Ministry of China, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430074 China

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First published: 12 May 2020

Abstract

Toehold-mediated DNA strand displacement endows DNA nanostructures with dynamic response capability. However, the complexity of sequence design dramatically increases as the size of the DNA network increases. We attribute this problem to the mechanism of toehold-mediated strand displacement, termed exact strand displacement (ESD), in which one input strand corresponds to one specific substrate. In this work, we propose an alternative to toehold-mediated DNA strand displacement, termed fuzzy strand displacement (FSD), in which one-to-many and many-to-one relationships are established between the input strand and the substrate, to reduce the complexity. We have constructed four modules, termed converter, reporter, fuzzy detector, and fuzzy trigger, and demonstrated that a sequence pattern recognition network composed of these modules requires less complex sequence design than an equivalent network based on toehold-mediated DNA strand displacement.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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