A geometric framework for reaction enumeration in computational nucleic acid devices

Abstract

Cascades of DNA strand displacement reactions enable the design of potentially large circuits with complex behaviour. Computational modelling of such systems is desirable to enable rapid design and analysis. In previous work, the expressive power of graph theory was used to enumerate reactions implementing strand displacement across a wide range of complex structures. However, coping with the rich variety of possible graph-based structures required enumeration rules with complicated side-conditions. This paper presents an alternative approach to tackle the problem of enumerating reactions at domain level involving complex structures by integrating with a geometric constraint solving algorithm. The rule sets from previous work are simplified by replacing side-conditions with a general check on the geometric plausibility of structures generated by the enumeration algorithm. This produces a highly general geometric framework for reaction enumeration. Here, we instantiate this framework to solve geometric constraints by a structure sampling approach in which we randomly generate sets of coordinates and check whether they satisfy all the constraints. We demonstrate this system by applying it to examples from the literature where molecular geometry plays an important role, including DNA hairpin and remote toehold reactions. This work therefore enables integration of reaction enumeration and structural modelling.