Biology subjects

Cabello-Garcia, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Cabello-Garcia, J..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Kinetic Proofreading can Enhance Single Nucleotide Discrimination in a Non-enzymatic DNA Strand Displacement Network

Kinetic proofreading is used throughout natural systems to enhance the specificity of molecular recognition. At its most basic level, kinetic proofreading uses a supply of chemical fuel to drive a recognition interaction out of equilibrium, allowing a single free-energy difference between correct and incorrect targets to be exploited two or more times. Despite its importance in biology, there has been little effort to incorporate kinetic proofreading into synthetic systems in which molecular recognition is important, such as nucleic acid nanotechnology. In this article, we introduce a DNA strand displacement-based kinetic proofreading motif, showing that the consumption of a DNA-based fuel can be used to enhance molecular recognition during a templated dimerization reaction. We then show that kinetic proofreading can enhance the specificity with which a probe discriminates single nucleotide mutations, both in terms of the initial rate with which the probe reacts and the long-time behaviour.

biophysics↗

bioRxiv2023

Information propagation through enzyme-free catalytic templating of DNA dimerization with weak product inhibition

Information propagation by sequence-specific, template-catalyzed molecular assembly is the source of the biochemical complexity of living systems. Templating allows the production of thousands of sequence-defined proteins from only 20 distinct building blocks. By contrast, exploitation of this powerful chemical motif is rare in non-biological contexts, particularly in enzyme-free environments, where even the template-catalyzed formation of dimers is a significant challenge. The main obstacle is product inhibition: the tendency of products to bind to their templates more strongly than individual monomers, preventing the effective catalytic templating of longer polymers. Here we present a rationally designed enzyme-free system in which a DNA template catalyzes, with weak competitive product inhibition, the production of sequence-specific DNA dimers. We demonstrate the selective templating of 9 different dimers with high specificity and catalytic turnover. Most importantly, our mechanism demonstrates a rational design principle for engineering information propagation by molecular templating of longer polymers.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2020

Handhold-mediated strand displacement: a nucleic acid-based mechanism for generating far-from-equilibrium assemblies through templated reactions

Toehold-mediated strand displacement (TMSD) is a nucleic acid-based reaction wherein an invader strand (I) replaces an incumbent strand (N) in a duplex with a target strand (T). TMSD is driven by toeholds, overhanging single-stranded domains in T recognised by I. Although TMSD is responsible for the outstanding potential of dynamic DNA nanotechnology1, 2, TMSD cannot implement templating, the central mechanism by which biological systems generate complex, far-from equilibrium assemblies like RNA or proteins3, 4. Therefore, we introduce handhold-mediated strand displacement (HMSD). Handholds are toehold analogues located in N and capable of implementing templating. We measure the kinetics of 98 different HMSD systems to demonstrate that handholds can accelerate the rate of invader-target (IT) binding by more than 4 orders of magnitude. Furthermore, handholds of moderate length accelerate reactions whilst allowing detachment of the product IT from N. We are thus able to experimentally demonstrate the use of HMSD-based templating to produce highly-specific far-from-equilibrium DNA duplexes.

biophysics↗