Stereochemical conversion of nucleic acid circuits via strand displacement

Remarkable accomplishments demonstrating the importance of nucleic acids in molecular engineering and computation have been made over the past two decades. However, much of the work in this area so far has been carried out in vitro, utilizing almost exclusively homochiral D-DNAs (or D-RNAs) as chemical building blocks. Such natural building blocks are prone to enzymatic degradation and cross-hybridization with the host’s genetic materials. Here we report the development of an orthogonal nucleic acid system that is made up of a left-handed and a right-handed conformer, and a non-helical peptide nucleic acid analogue. We show that the stereochemical information inherent in the right-handed and left-handed conformers can be interconverted from (R) to (S) and vice versa, along with their helical sense and recognition capability, through strand displacement. The genetic information encoded in these synthetic building blocks can be interfaced with DNA or RNA through a molecular converter