Cover Picture: Autonomous Fueled Mechanical Replication of Nucleic Acid Templates for the Amplified Optical Detection of DNA (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 14/2006)

A catalytic cutter for the sensitive detection of a target DNA, a Tay–Sachs disorder mutant, is described by I. Willner and co‐workers in their Communication on page 2238 ff. As the cover picture shows, a tailored nucleic acid hairpin probe (top) is opened upon hybridization with the analyte DNA, activating the formation of the DNA cutter (central structure), which initiates the autonomous scission of a fuel substrate that leads to the replication of the catalytic cutter and to the formation of a fluorescent product as an optical readout signal.