Erasable and Field Programmable DNA Circuits Based on Configurable Logic Blocks

Abstract

DNA is commonly employed as a substrate for the building of artificial logic networks due to its excellent biocompatibility and programmability. Till now, DNA logic circuits have been rapidly evolving to accomplish advanced operations. Nonetheless, the process of creating DNA logic circuits according to personal needs (logical truth table) requires extensive knowledge on digital circuits. Moreover, even after the researchers endeavor to build a DNA circuit, it lacks field programmability and thereby being disposable and inconvenient. Herein, inspired by the Configurable Logic Block (CLB) paradigm in silicon digital circuits, we present the CLB-based field-programmable DNA circuit that uses clip strands as its operation-controlling signals. It substantially simplifies the construction of desired circuits by establishing the relationship between circuits and operation-controlling strands. Additionally, the field programmability enables users to realize diverse functions with limited hardware. We firstly constructed CLB-based basic logic gates (OR and AND), and effectively demonstrate their eras ability and field programmability. Furthermore, by simply adding the appropriate operation-controlling strands, we achieved multiple rounds of switch among 5 different logic operations on a single two-layer circuit. In addition, we successfully built a circuit to implement two fundamental binary calculators: half-adder and half-subtractor, proving that our design could imitate silicon-based binary circuits. Finally, we built a comprehensive CLB-based circuit that enabled multiple rounds of switch among 7 different logic operations including half-adding and half-subtracting. Overall, the CLB-based field-programmable circuit greatly streamlines the process to build DNA circuits and immensely enhances their practicability. We believe our design could be widely used in DNA logic networks due to its efficiency and convenience.