Hybridization of complementary sequences is one of the central tenets of nucleic acid chemistry; however, the unintended binding of closely related sequences limits the accuracy of hybridization-based approaches for analyzing nucleic acids. Thermodynamics-guided probe design and empirical optimization of reaction conditions have been used to enable discrimination of single nucleotide variants, but typically these approaches provide only an approximate 25-fold difference in binding affinity. Here we show that simulations of the binding kinetics are both necessary and sufficient to design nucleic acid probe systems with consistently high specificity as they enable the discovery of an optimal combination of thermodynamic parameters. Simulation-guided probe systems designed against 44 different target single nucleotide variants sequences showed between 200- and 3000-fold (median 890) higher binding affinity than their corresponding wildtype sequences. As a demonstration of the usefulness of this simulation-guided design approach we developed probes which, in combination with PCR amplification, we use to detect low concentrations of variant alleles (1%) in human genomic DNA.
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