PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Burcu Özay
AU  - Cara M Robertus
AU  - Jackson L Negri
AU  - Stephanie E McCalla
TI  - Biphasic, Switch-Like Isothermal DNA Amplification
AID  - 10.1101/169805
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 169805
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/169805.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/169805.full
AB  - Switch-like reactions are common in the natural world; they are vital to basic cellular operations such as signaling and genetic regulation. Synthetic systems have aimed to reproduce this effect for applications from DNA computing to molecular diagnostics. These systems can produce switch-like behavior, but typically respond to nanomolar input of target molecule. We report a novel DNA amplification chemistry that has two switch-like characteristics. First, the chemistry is biphasic, with a low-gain initial phase and plateau followed by a high gain burst of signal. Second, the reaction kinetics can produce a large ultrasensitive jump in signal during the second phase. Reaction output at each stage can be rationally tuned based on DNA association ther-modynamics. The chemistry is one-step, isothermal, and can be adapted to respond to a broad range of input target molecules. This isothermal DNA amplification reaction could potentially impact a variety of disciplines such as synthetic biology, biosensors, DNA computing, and clinical diagnostics.