Catalyzed relaxation of a metastable DNA fuel

摘要: Practically all of life's molecular processes, from chemical synthesis to replication, involve enzymes that carry out their functions through the catalytic transformation metastable fuels into waste products. Catalytic control reaction rates will prove be as useful and ubiquitous in nucleic-acid-based engineering it is biology. Here we report a DNA "fuel" corresponding "catalyst" improve upon original hybridization-based catalyst system (Turberfield et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 118102-1- 118102-4) by more than 2 orders magnitude. This achieved identifying purifying fuel with kinetically trapped configuration consisting "kissing loop" stabilized flanking helical domains; strand acts opening domain allowing complex relax its ground state multistep pathway. The improved fuel/catalyst shows roughly 5000-fold acceleration uncatalyzed reaction, each molecule capable turning over excess 40 substrates. With kcat /KM 10 7 /M/min, comparable many protein ribozymes, this becomes viable component enabling future DNA-based synthetic machines logic circuits. As an example, designed characterized signal amplifier based on fuel-catalyst system. uses single input releases second unrelated sequence output. A can catalytically trigger release output strands.