Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Molecular Beacon Based DNA Computing Model for General Satisfiability Problem
Authors	YIN Zhi-Xiang1),2) CUI Jian-Zhong1) ZHI Ling-Ying1) SUN Xia1) HUANG Xiao-Hui1)
Address	1)(School of Sience, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, Anhui 232001) 2)(Department of Control Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074)
Year	2008
Issue	No.12(2200—2206)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract Molecular Beacon is a hairpin-shaped fluorescent probe, which can hybridize with great specificity target sequence that is complement to its loop sequence. The specificity of Molecular Beacon is as high as single base mismatch detection. Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) is an artificial synthesized analogue of nature occurring DNA, in which the DNA sugar-phosphate backbone has been replaced by a pseudo-peptide. Thus the hybridization of PNA to complement DNA strand is more specific and stable than that of DNA to DNA. PNA can stop polymerase extension reaction as well. In this paper, Molecular Beacons were employed to encode variables in satisfiability problem and complement PNA strands were added and allowed to hybridize with Molecular Beacon. The hybridized PNA strands on Molecular Beacon stopped polymerase extension reaction, causing Molecular Beacon corresponding to non-solution were digested by means of restriction endonuclease EcoRI. The remaining Molecular Beacons encoding solutions were read out via heating. The appealing characteristics of proposed method in this paper are: Reliable, no observation and record of midst solution, easy solution detection. Keywords DNA computing; satisfiability problem; Molecular Beacon; peptide nucleic acid; fluorescence