Accelerating Turnover Frequency in Nucleic Acid Templated Reactions

Nucleic acid templated reactions have attracted attention as an important technology to sense oligonucleotides and to translate nucleic acid-based instructions into diverse outputs. Great progress has been made in accelerating the reaction in order to improve signal amplification, reaching rates where substrate turnover rather than chemical reaction is rate limiting. Herein we explore the utility of architectures inspired by three-way junction that yield a cleavage of a strand thus accelerating substrate turnover. We demonstrate that such design can overcome product inhibition in templated reactions and operate close to the rate of hybridization.