Sprecher
Beschreibung
The templating of sequence-specific assembly is at the heart of biological complexity; DNA replication, RNA transcription and protein translation are all examples of this process. Extant biological systems exhibit high-fidelity templating of long polymers using purely chemical driving forces; the question of how simpler processes of this kind emerged is at the heart of the origin of life.
Hitherto, efforts to build systems that perform molecular templating without either highly-evolved enzymes or a non-chemical supply of energy have met with limited success. A key challenge is in overcoming product inhibition - the tendency of products to adhere to their templates, an effect that gets exponentially worse with copy length.
We introduce a DNA-based reaction mechanism, handhold-mediated strand displacement (HMSD), that allows for chemically-driven, sequence-specific templating with low product inhibition. We show how HMSD-based templates are effective catalysts for dimerisation, and demonstrate both kinetic proofreading and self-replication with this system.
