Fuel-Driven Catalytic Molecular Templating

Abstract

Catalytic molecular templating, wherein a copolymer molecule serves as a sequence-specific template to propagate genetic information to a daughter copolymer, is fundamental to cells. Templating underlies DNA replication, RNA transcription, and protein translation, underpinning the molecular basis of heredity, evolution, and biological function and allowing staggering complexity to arise from simple building blocks. It has hitherto been challenging to emulate templating without highly evolved enzymes, largely due to product inhibition of catalytic turnover, which is a major challenge for templated dimerization and prohibitive for longer products. We present an enzyme-free DNA-based templated dimerization reaction enabled and controlled by a fuel strand that actively displaces the product from the template only once dimerization is complete, overcoming product inhibition. We systematically investigate design variants to optimize catalytic turnover and demonstrate information propagation through the action of distinct templates that assemble specific products from the same pool of building blocks. We also show that the fuel represents an input by which the templating can be controlled, allowing the coupling of catalytic turnover to the output of upstream DNA circuitry.