The specificity and predictability of Watson–Crick base pairing make DNA a powerful and
versatile material for engineering at the nanoscale. This has enabled the construction of a …

Alternative foldings are an inherent property of RNA and a ubiquitous problem in scientific
investigations. To a living organism, alternative foldings can be a blessing or a problem, and …

Background Secondary structure forms an important intermediate level of description of
nucleic acids that encapsulates the dominating part of the folding energy, is often well …

Dynamic DNA nanotechnology often uses toehold-mediated strand displacement for
controlling reaction kinetics. Although the dependence of strand displacement kinetics on …

We introduce the concept of hybridization chain reaction (HCR), in which stable DNA
monomers assemble only upon exposure to a target DNA fragment. In the simplest version …

In nature, self-assembling and disassembling complexes of proteins and nucleic acids
bound to a variety of ligands perform intricate and diverse dynamic functions. In contrast …

Plant microRNAs (miRNAs) affect only a small number of targets with high sequence
complementarity, while animal miRNAs usually have hundreds of targets with limited …

Living things are unimaginably complex, yet they have withstood a withering assault of
harmful influences over several billion years. These influences include cataclysmic changes …

The central vertices in complex networks are of particular interest because they might play
the role of organizational hubs. Here, we consider three different geometric centrality …

RNA folding from sequences into secondary structures is a simple yet powerful,
biophysically grounded model of a genotype–phenotype map in which concepts like …