Hypernova: a faster and brighter light-producing deoxyribozyme.

Hypernova, an improved light-producing deoxyribozyme variant of Supernova, shows up to 97-fold higher reaction rate at subsaturating substrate concentrations and up to 30-fold faster initial light production.

• Why it matters: Optimizing functional nucleic acid motifs can make improved variants rarer in sequence space, making them harder to find with standard discovery approaches.
• What they did: The team screened two library designs—one enforcing catalytic motif sequence/secondary-structure constraints and another swapping AAAA spacers with random short stretches—then combined 12 mutations from top deoxyribozymes.
• The result: Hypernova-derived sensors outperformed Supernova-based sensors in three assays, supporting Hypernova as a way to boost light-producing deoxyribozyme sensor performance for diagnostics and high-throughput screening.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.