User:ElNando888/Blog/A less naive AND gate

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Well, I should rather say, a possibly less naive AND gate. In the previous blog entry, the presented idea has a major drawback: it would probably only ever work co-transcriptionally, because after the sequences have had enough time to reach their MFE, it would be very unlikely for them to unfold enough so as to dimerize again.

 

So, I've been thinking again, and I came up with a fancier plan. I'm not sure if we'll ever get a chance to test a construct like that (which is a pity, I'd love to see how miserably this construct would fail), but the time spent in the conception was fun anyway.

 

I completely randomly chose 2 micro-RNAs from mirBASE:

 

1. A sensing sequence

Mir-AND-1.png

MiRNA-AND-gate-1.png

 

2. The first miRNA "docks"

Mir-AND-2a.png Mir-AND-2b.png
  Note: because the marked bases are not spatially constrained in the case shown above, the strand displacement as depicted in steps 3-4 is (hopefully) far less likely to occur.

 

3. Both miRNAs are docked

Mir-AND-3.png

MiRNA-AND-gate-2.png

 

4. Strand displaced

Mir-AND-4.png

 

5. The signal segment refolds to (now more stable) MS2 hairpin

Mir-AND-5.png

MiRNA-AND-gate-3.png

 

 

And voila!

(yeah, right)