Cascadable-Controllable Self-Assembly DNA Tiles for Large-Scale DNA Logic Circuits

In the last few decades, DNA-based self-assembly tiles has become a hot field in research due to its special applications and advantages. The regularity and strong design methods comprise other DNA-based digital circuit design methods. In addition to the obvious advantages of this method, there are challenges in performing computations based on self-assembly tiles, which have hindered the development and construction of large computing circuits with this method. The first challenge is the creation of crystals from DNA molecules in the output, which has led to the impossibility of cascading. The second challenge of this method is the uncontrollability of the reactions of the tiles, which increases the percentage of computing errors. In this article, these two challenges have been solved by changing the structure of leading tiles so that without the activator strand, tiles remain inactive and cannot be connected to other tiles. Also, when the tiles are activated, single-strand DNA will be released after connecting to other tiles, which will be used as the output of the circuit. This output gives the possibility of cascading to self-assembly designed circuits. The method introduced in this article can be a beginning for the re-development of DNA-based circuit design with the self-assembly tile method.