DNA nanotechnology is a fairly young area of research focused on the utilization of DNA and analogous polymers to engineer dynamic nanoscale architectures and devices for various applications. Traditionally, only the naturally occurring stereoisomer of DNA is used in DNA nanotechnology. Given the inherent drawbacks of using D-DNA, much effort has been put towards the development of more robust pseudo-DNA analogs1. We believe that using L-DNA, the opposite stereoisomer of natural DNA, is a straightforward solution to this problem. Indeed, L-DNA has identical physical properties to the D-enantiomer but native enzymes and proteins are unable to recognize it and degrade it2. The unifying paradigm in nucleic acid nanotechnologies is the toehold mediated strand displacement reaction3-5. Strand displacement relies upon sequence recognition and displacement of an oligomer by a longer fully complimentary oligomer. We circumvent D- and L- DNAs inability to hybridize by employing an achiral nucleic acid analog peptide nucleic acid (PNA)6.

Heterochiral DNA strand displacement circuits

255th National Meeting (2018)

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