Biomolecular computation with molecular beacons for quantitative analysis of target nucleic acids

Hee Woong Lim, Seung Hwan Lee, Kyung Ae Yang, Suk In Yoo, Tai Hyun Park, Byoung Tak Zhang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Molecular beacons are efficient and useful tools for quantitative detection of specific target nucleic acids. Thanks to their simple protocol, molecular beacons have great potential as substrates for biomolecular computing. Here we present a molecular beacon-based biomolecular computing method for quantitative detection and analysis of target nucleic acids. Whereas the conventional quantitative assays using fluorescent dyes have been designed for single target detection or multiplexed detection, the proposed method enables us not only to detect multiple targets but also to compute their quantitative information by weighted-sum of the targets. The detection and computation are performed on a molecular level simultaneously, and the outputs are detected as fluorescence signals. Experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of our weighted detection and linear combination method using molecular beacons. Our method can serve as a primitive operation of molecular pattern analysis, and we demonstrate successful binary classifications of molecular patterns made of synthetic oligonucleotide DNA molecules.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11-17
Number of pages7
JournalBioSystems
Volume111
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2013

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by Molecular Evolutionary Computing (MEC) project of MKE, in part by IT R&D Program of MKE/KEIT ( 10035348 , mLife), in part by NRF grants of MEST (No. 2012-0005643 , Videome; No. 2012-0005801 , BrainNet), and in part by the BK21-IT program funded by Korean Government (MEST) . KAY was supported by the Korea Research Foundation ( KRF-2008-532-C00031 ). The ICT at Seoul National University provided research facilities for this study. The authors thank Russell J. Deaton for his careful proofreading and invaluable comments on this paper.

Keywords

  • Biomolecular computation
  • Molecular beacon
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Weighted-sum

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