Visual DSD: a design and analysis tool for DNA strand displacement systems

  • Matthew R Lakin ,
  • Simon Youssef ,
  • Filippo Polo ,
  • Stephen Emmott ,
  • Andrew Phillips

Bioinformatics | , Vol 27: pp. 3211-3213

Summary: The Visual DSD (DNA Strand Displacement) tool allows rapid prototyping and analysis of computational devices implemented using DNA strand displacement, in a convenient web-based graphical interface. It is an implementation of the DSD programming language and compiler described by Lakin et al. (2011) with additional features such as support for polymers of unbounded length. It also supports stochastic and deterministic simulation, construction of continuous-time Markov chains and various export formats which allow models to be analysed using third-party tools.

Availability: Visual DSD is available as a web-based Silverlight application for most major browsers on Windows and Mac OS X at http://research.microsoft.com/dna. It can be installed locally for offline use. Command-line versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are also available from the web page.