From cascaded catalytic nucleic acids to enzyme-DNA nanostructures: Controlling reactivity, sensing, logic operations, and assembly of complex structures

The review provides information about different recent approaches to tailor 'smart' DNA nanostructures for autonomous activation of catalytic DNA cascades and their use for sensing, logic operations, and assembly of complex nanostructures. The relative stabilities of duplex DNA nanostructures provide instructive information for dynamic transitions within duplex DNA systems. One of these dynamic transformations is the DNA strand-displacement process one or more DNA strand(s) hybridized with a nucleic acid template, which includes an exposed single-stranded domain is being displaced by an auxiliary DNA strand exhibiting complementarity to the 'toehold' domain and partial, or full, complementarity to the template DNA sequence. The analyte-triggered isothermal autonomous hybridization chain reaction (HCR) also provides a general principle to stimulate formation of DNA polymeric nanowires as a result of the primary recognition event.