The Design and Application of Exclusive OR Logical Computation Based on DNA 3-Arm Sub-Tile Self-Assembly

Abstract

DNA algorithmic self-assembly plays a vital role in DNA computing, which is applied to create new DNA tiles and then guides these tiles into an algorithmic lattice. However, the larger the logical calculation scale is, the more tile sets will be needed, so that computing model design and experiment will be increasingly difficult. This paper presents a new DNA ‘3-arm sub-tile strategy’ that constructs XOR and half-adder logical circuits. The types of DNA tile corresponding to the logical values is unified in DNA XOR and half-adder logical circuits, which have only three kinds of DNA tiles: logic ‘0’, logic ‘1’ and fixation tile. Compared with the previous references, the amount of DNA tile types has been greatly reduced. Moreover, the half-adder molecular circuit has a distinctive feature, which is an application of the expansion of the XOR logic circuit. Meanwhile, a set of DNA 3-arm sub-tiles suitable for half-adder logical computation is designed on the NUPACK online server. The simulated experiments show that the correct rate of base pairing of the designed DNA encoding is high and the structures are stable. The DNA 3-arm sub-tile self-assembly methods provide a new way to form DNA logical circuits, and has a great potential in the expansion of the integrated circuits.