Biochemical relaxation oscillator designed to control molecular computation

Abstract

Embedding efficient calculation instructions into biochemical systems has always been a research focus in synthetic biology. Amongst this, the main challenge is how to overcome the contradiction between the parallel occurrence of biochemical reactions and the ordinal implementation of calculation instructions. In response to this challenge, the current work presents a new 4-dimensional biochemical oscillator model based on the relaxation oscillation to generate a pair of symmetric clock signals for dual-module regulation tasks through chemical reaction networks. The pair of symmetric clock signals separately act as a catalyst to participate the corresponding reaction modular of performing calculation, and control their on/off switch if the concentration of the clock signal is nonzero. The detailed discussions are subsequently made on the important effect of the oscillator parameters on controlling the period and the occurrence order of clock signals. Further, the oscillator is applied to control the iteration calculation, along with which a termination strategy is proposed to jump out of the loop.