Full Adder and Full Subtractor Operations by DNA Self-Assembly

Due to optical wavelength limitations in conventional lithographic fabrication techniques and physical limits, silicon-based technology improvements will soon begin to approach their ultimate limits. Self-assembly is one of the most prospective methods to overcome the contact problem, and became one of the most important directions of molecular electronics development. In this paper, three kinds of stable DNA tiles including the x tiles, y tiles and initialization corner c tiles are constructed to execute the full adder and full subtractor operations with three oligonucleotides as inputs and two independent fluorogenic cleavage reactions as outputs. This work indicates that the realization of the full adder and full subtractor using DNA self-assembly are carried with parallel logic gates operations. The method that we discuss here are fundamental to the logical operations, but it seems possible to further extend more complex logic circuits using a molecular computer by self-assembly.