DNA Logic Circuits with a DNA Polymerase and a Nicking Enzyme

The current most popular and established approach to DNA logic circuits is the implementation by DNA strands reaction networks where toehold-mediated strand displacement invokes and performs the evaluation of each DNA logic gate. Strand displacement approach requires, however, a large amount of time, for instance, approximately 30 minutes, to execute a logic operation ([18]). Furthermore, the concentration of an output molecule released from a gate can not exceed that of the gate molecule. Therefore, it is often the case that large quantities of input and gate molecules are required when the gate is of large out-degree. In order to overcome these problems, it is indispensable to devise a DNA logic gate which runs quickly and can amplify the quantity of the output molecule. We will propose a DNA implementation of logic gates with such good properties using DNA polymerase and nicking enzyme.