DNA as a Recyclable Natural Polymer

Nature has the ability of circularly re-using its components to produce molecules and materials it needs. An example is the ability of most living organisms of digesting proteins they feed off into amino acids and then using such amino acids in the ribosomal synthesis of new proteins. Recently, we have shown that such recycling of proteins can be reproduced outside living organisms. The key feature of proteins that allows for this type of recycling is their being sequence-defined polymers. Arguably, the most famous sequence-defined polymer in Nature is DNA. Here we show that it is possible starting from sheared calf-DNA to obtain all the four nucleotides as monophosphate-nucleotides (dNMPs). These dNMPs were phosphorylated in a one-pot, multi-enzymes, phosphorylation reaction to generate triphosphate-nucleotides (dNTPs). Finally, we used the dNTPs so achieved (with a global yield of ~60%) as reagents for PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and quantitative PCR (qPCR) to produce target DNA strands. This approach is an efficient, convenient, and environmentally friendly way to produce dNTPs and DNA through recycling according to the paradigm of circular economy.