Hieu Bui

Department of Computer Science, Duke University

 

A majority of enzyme-free DNA hybridization reactions in DNA-based molecular systems are limited by the diffusion process - the reaction rates occur faster in the presence of high concentration of reactants, and vice versa. However spurious/unintended interactions are found to be correlated with high concentration of reactants. A solution to reduce spurious interactions is to decrease the concentration of the reactants; however, the hybridization reaction rates, due to the diffusion limitation, take longer for the reactions to complete. Because spurious interactions mitigate the overall functionalities of the DNA-based molecular systems, we propose an alternative method (a follow-up work to Chandran et. al. in 2011) to reduce the interactions. By directly performing the DNA hybridization reactions on fixed nanoscale substrates instead of free-floating in solutions, we conjecture that the spurious interactions are reduced due to spatial locality. This method is expected to achieve minimal spurious interactions and fast DNA hybridization reaction rates.