Effective design principles for leakless strand displacement systems
Significance The modern information age was enabled by encoding, transmitting, and manipulating information in a way that is robust to error. However, synthetic biology and molecular programming, fields that aim to recapitulate the successes of electronics within biochemistry, still struggle with error tolerance. The ability to create “smart” molecular systems capable of robust information processing and decision making would enable important applications in biomaterial production, biosensing, and therapeutics. Based on DNA strand displacement building blocks, we demonstrate de novo engineered molecular cascades robust to spurious interactions using an error correction scheme based on redundancy. In principle, arbitrary levels of error reduction could be attained. The information propagation cascades form a foundation for more complex, resilient, and faster programmable reaction networks.