ACS Synthetic Biology
ACS Synthetic Biology
5 years ago

Dynamic Control of Aptamer–Ligand Activity Using Strand Displacement Reactions

Dynamic Control of Aptamer–Ligand Activity Using Strand Displacement Reactions
Christian Cuba Samaniego, Hari K. K. Subramanian, Krishen Wadhwani, Claire H. Tran, Elisa Franco, Jonathan Lloyd
Nucleic acid aptamers are an expandable toolkit of sensors and regulators. To employ aptamer regulators within nonequilibrium molecular networks, the aptamer–ligand interactions should be tunable over time, so that functions within a given system can be activated or suppressed on demand. This is accomplished through complementary sequences to aptamers, which achieve programmable aptamer–ligand dissociation by displacing the aptamer from the ligand. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our simple approach on light-up aptamers as well as on aptamers inhibiting viral RNA polymerases, dynamically controlling the functionality of the aptamer–ligand complex. Mathematical models allow us to obtain estimates for the aptamer displacement kinetics. Our results suggest that aptamers, paired with their complement, could be used to build dynamic nucleic acid networks with direct control over a variety of aptamer-controllable enzymes and their downstream pathways.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.7b00277

DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.7b00277

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.