Abstract

The goal of synthetic biology is to design and assemble synthetic systems that mimic biological systems. One of the most fundamental challenges in synthetic biology is to synthesize artificial biochemical systems, which we will call meta-biochemical systems, that provide the same functionality as biological nucleic acids-enzyme systems, but that use a very limited number of types of molecules. The motivation for developing such synthetic biology systems is to enable a better understanding of the basic processes of natural biology, and also to enable re-engineering and programmability of synthetic versions of biological systems. One of the key aspects of modern nucleic acid biochemistry is its extensive use of protein enzymes that were originally evolved in cells to manipulate nucleic acids, and then later adapted by man for laboratory use. This practice provided powerful tools for manipulating nucleic acids, but also limited the extent of the programmability of the available chemistry for manipulating nucleic acids, since it is very difficult to predictively modify the behavior of protein enzymes. Meta-biochemical systems offer the possible advantage of being far easier to re-engineer and program for desired functionality. The approach taken here is to develop a biochemical system which we call meta-DNA (abbreviated as mDNA), based entirely on strands of DNA as the only component molecules. Our work leverages prior work on the development of self-assembled DNA nanostructures (see Amin et al.

Citations