Allosteric DNAzyme-based DNA logic circuit: operations and dynamic analysis

Recently, due to the dual roles of DNA and enzyme, DNAzyme has been widely used in the field of DNA circuit, which has a wide range of applications in bio-engineered system, information processing and biocomputing. In fact, the activity of DNAzymes was regulated by subunits assembly, pH control and metal ions triggers. However, those regulations required to change the sequences of whole DNAzyme, as separating parts and inserting extra DNA sequence. Inspired by the allosteric regulation of proteins in nature, a new allosteric strategy is proposed to regulate the activity of DNAzyme without DNA sequences changes. In this strategy, DNA strand displacement was used to regulate the DNAzyme structure, through which the activity of DNAzyme was well controlled. The strategy was applied to E6-type DNAzymes, and the operations of DNA logic circuit (YES, OR, AND, cascading and feedback) were established and simulated with the dynamic analyses. The allosteric regulation has potential to construct more complicated molecular systems, which can be applied to bio-sensing and detection.