Reconfiguration of DNA molecular arrays driven by information relay.

Abstract

Information relay at the molecular level is an essential phenomenon in numerous chemical and biological processes, such as intricate signaling cascades. One key challenge in synthetic molecular self-assembly is to construct artificial structures that imitate these complex behaviors in controllable systems. We demonstrated prescribed, long-range information relay in an artificial molecular array assembled from modular DNA structural units. The dynamic DNA molecular array exhibits transformations with programmable initiation, propagation, and regulation. The transformation of the array can be initiated at selected units and then propagated, without addition of extra triggers, to neighboring units and eventually the entire array. The specific information pathways by which this transformation occurs can be controlled by altering the design of individual units and the arrays.