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Form of Computing in Which

DNA computing is a form of computing that uses DNA molecules instead of traditional silicon-based circuits. DNA computing encodes information into DNA strands that can undergo billions of calculations simultaneously through processes like recombination. This field was pioneered in 1994 by Leonard Adleman, who demonstrated using DNA to solve the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since then, DNA computers have been shown to perform millions of times faster than traditional computers and have potential applications like cancer diagnosis and drug release.

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28 views

Form of Computing in Which

DNA computing is a form of computing that uses DNA molecules instead of traditional silicon-based circuits. DNA computing encodes information into DNA strands that can undergo billions of calculations simultaneously through processes like recombination. This field was pioneered in 1994 by Leonard Adleman, who demonstrated using DNA to solve the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since then, DNA computers have been shown to perform millions of times faster than traditional computers and have potential applications like cancer diagnosis and drug release.

Uploaded by

Sukadev Sahu
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Form of computing in which DNA molecules are used instead of digital logic circuits.

The biological cell is regarded as an entity that resembles a sophisticated computer. The four amino acid bases that
are constituents of DNA, traditionally represented by the letters A, T, C, and G, are used as operators, as the binary digits 0 and 1 are used in computers. DNA molecules are encoded to a researcher’s
specifications and then induced to recombine (see recombination), resulting in trillions of “calculations” simultaneously. The field is in its infancy and its implications are only beginning to be explored

DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and biochemistry and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. DNA
computing, or, more generally, molecular computing, is a fast developing interdisciplinary area. R&D in this area concerns theory, experiments and applications of DNA
computing.

This field was initially developed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California. In 1994, Adleman demonstrated aproof-of-concept use of DNA as a form of

computation which solved the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made and various Turing

machines have been proven to be constructible.

In 2002, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA

molecules instead of silicon microchips. The computer could perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. [1]

On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro, Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, and Rivka Adar at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had

constructed a DNA computer. This was coupled with an input and output module and is capable of diagnosing cancerous activity within a cell, and then releasing an anti-

cancer drug upon diagnosis.

DNA computing is fundamentally similar to parallel computing in that it takes advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once.

For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. But DNA computing does not provide any new capabilities

from the standpoint of computational complexity theory, the study of which computational problems are difficult to solve. For example, problems which grow exponentially

with the size of the problem (EXPSPACE problems) onvon Neumann machines still grow exponentially with the size of the problem on DNA machines. For very large

EXPSPACE problems, the amount of DNA required is too large to be practical. (Quantum computing, on the other hand, does provide some interesting new capabilities).

DNA computing overlaps with, but is distinct from, DNA nanotechnology. The latter uses the specificity of Watson-Crick basepairingand other DNA properties to make

novel structures out of DNA. These structures can be used for DNA computing, but they do not have to be. Additionally, DNA computing can be done without using the

types of molecules made possible by DNA nanotechnology (as the above examples show).

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