Design of universal chemical relaxation oscillator to control molecular computation

Abstract

Embedding efficient command operation into biochemical system has always been a research focus in synthetic biology. One of the key problems is how to sequence the chemical reactions that act as units of computation. The answer is to design chemical oscillator, a component that acts as a clock signal to turn corresponding reaction on or off. Some previous work mentioned the use of chemical oscillations. However, the models used either lack a systematic analysis of the mechanism and properties of oscillation, or are too complex to be tackled with in practice. Our work summarizes the universal process for designing chemical oscillators, including generating robust oscillatory species, constructing clock signals from these species, and setting up termination component to eventually end the loop of whole reaction modules. We analyze the dynamic properties of the proposed oscillator model in the context of ordinary differential equations, and discuss how to determine parameters for the effect we want in detail. Our model corresponds to abstract chemical reactions based on mass-action kinetics which are expected to be implemented into chemistry with the help of DNA strand displacement cascades. Our consideration of ordering chemical reaction modules helps advance the embedding of more complex calculations into biochemical environments.