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Updated: Apr 20, 2026

Plasmid-derived DNA Strand Displacement Gates for Implementing Chemical Reaction Networks
Published on: November 25, 2015
Reachability bounds for chemical reaction networks and strand displacement systems
Anne Condon1, Bonnie Kirkpatrick1, Ján Maňuch2
1Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Canada.
Abstract:
Chemical reaction networks (CRNs) and DNA strand displacement systems (DSDs) are widely-studied and useful models of molecular programming. However, in order for some DSDs in the literature to behave in an expected manner, the initial number of copies of some reagents is required to be fixed. In this paper we show that, when multiple copies of all initial molecules are present, general types of CRNs and DSDs fail to work correctly if the length of the shortest sequence of reactions needed to produce any given molecule exceeds a threshold that grows polynomially with attributes of the system.
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