Effects of Fluorescent Pair on the Kinetics of DNA Strand Displacement Reaction

Fluorescent labels are widely used in the characterizations of DNA-based reaction network operations. We systematically studied the effects of commonly used fluorescent pairs on thermal stabilities of signal-substrate duplex and the strand displacement kinetics. It is demonstrated that the modifications of duplex with fluorescent pairs stabilize DNA duplex by up to 3.5 °C, and the kinetics of DNA strand displacement circuit is also evidently slowed down. These results highlight the importance of fluorescent pairs towards the kinetic modulation in designing nucleic acid probes and complex DNA dynamic circuits.