DNA Hybridization Catalysts and Catalyst Circuits

Practically all of life's functions, from chemical synthesis to replication, involve enzymes that carry out their functions through the catalysis of metastable fuels into waste products. Biological catalysis ratios are frequently as high as 10sup6 to 10sup9. Catalytic control of reaction rates will prove to be as useful and ubiquituous in DNA nanotechnology as it is in biology. Here we demonstrate a DNA hybridization catalyst that accelerates the conversion of a metastable DNA "fuel" into a "waste product" by a factor of approximately 2500. This is a substantial improvement over the original DNA hybridization catalyst [9] which achieved a speed-up of roughly 30. As an example application, we propose a method for implementing arbitrary digital logic circuits using DNA hybridization catalysis.