Team:MIT/Motivation

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Each of these:
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</br><img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/6/6c/MIT_Curly_strand_1.png" height=75> <img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/3/36/MIT_Curly_strand_2.png" height=75>
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</br><img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/6/6c/MIT_Curly_strand_1.png" height=30> <img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/3/36/MIT_Curly_strand_2.png" height=30>
</br>undergoes the same <b>toehold-mediated strand displacement reaction</b>. These reactions are fully modular and can be scaled to circuits of any degree of sophistication.
</br>undergoes the same <b>toehold-mediated strand displacement reaction</b>. These reactions are fully modular and can be scaled to circuits of any degree of sophistication.

Revision as of 02:19, 27 October 2012

iGEM 2012

Background and Motivation

In the near future, biological circuits will be much more modular and sophisticated than they are now, with a ten-fold smaller nucleotide footprint.

The Enabling Technology: Toehold-Mediated Strand Displacement

A gate strand and output strand exist as a complex that is partially bound through complementary Watson-Crick base-pairing within the S2 binding domain. The gate strand also contains an open, unbound domain called a toehold region, T*. An input strand with a free complementary toehold region, T, can bind to the toehold region on the gate strand, and subsequently displace the output strand to yield an input-gate complex. This is called a toehold-mediated strand displacement reaction. The output strand is used as an input for a downstream gate-output complex.

Background

Qian and Winfree (Science 2011) utilized DNA computation to create AND and OR logic gates in vitro. They constructed a sophisticated binary square root circuit using these gates:
Each of these:

undergoes the same toehold-mediated strand displacement reaction. These reactions are fully modular and can be scaled to circuits of any degree of sophistication.

Motivation for Bringing Strand Displacement to Mammalian Synthetic Biology