DNA computing, currently a hot research field in information processing, has the advantages of parallelism, low energy consumption, and high storability, therefore, it has been applied to a variety of complicated computational problems. The emerging field of DNA nanotechnology has also developed quickly; within it, the method of DNA strand displacement has drawn great attention because it is self-induced, sensitive, accurate, and operationally simple. This article summarizes five aspects of the recent developments of DNA-strand displacement in DNA computing:(1) cascading circuits;(2) catalyzed reaction;(3) logic computation;(4) DNA computing on surfaces; and(5) logic computing based on nanoparticles guided by strand displacement. The applications and mechanisms of strand displacement in DNA computing are discussed and possible future developments are presented.
With the progress of DNA computing, DNAbased cryptography becomes an emerging interdisciplinary research field. In this paper, we present a novel DNA cryptography that takes advantage of DNA self-assembled structure. Making use of the toehold strands recognition and strand displacement, the bit-wise exclusive-or(XOR)operation is carried out to fulfill the information encryption and decryption in the form of a one-time-pad. The security of this system mainly comes from the physical isolation and specificity of DNA molecules. The system is constructed by using complex DNA self-assembly, in which technique of fluorescent detection is utilized to implement the signal processing. In the proposed DNA cryptography,the XOR operation at each bit is carried out individually,thus the encryption and decryption process could be conducted in a massive, parallel way. This work may demonstrate that DNA cryptography has the great potential applications in the field of information security.
