Pursuit-and-Evasion Reaction-Diffusion Waves in Microreactors with Tailored Geometry

Abstract

Out-of-equilibrium chemical systems may self-organize into structures displaying spatiotemporal order, such as traveling waves and Turing patterns. Because of its predictable chemistry, DNA has recently appeared as an interesting candidate to engineer these spatiotemporal structures. However, in addition to the intrinsic chemical parameters, initial and boundary conditions have a major impact on the final structure. Here we take advantage of microfluidics to design controlled reactors and investigate pursuit-and-evasion chemical waves generated by a DNA-based reaction network with Predator-Prey dynamics. We first propose two complementary microfabrication strategies to either control the initial condition or the two-dimensional geometry of the reactor where the waves develop. We subsequently use them to investigate the effect of curvature in wave propagation. We finally show that DNA-based waves can compute the optimal path within a maze. We thus suggest that coupling configurable microfluidics to programmable DNA-based dissipative reaction networks is a powerful route to investigate spatiotemporal order formation in chemistry.