DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computertechnologies. A single gram of DNA about the size of half inch cube can hold as much information as a trillion compact disks.
There are works over one dimensional lengths, bidimensional tiles, and even three dimensional DNA graphs processing.
On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro and researchers at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had constructed a DNA computer from biomatter extracted from human feces. 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 -- we take advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once. The number of possible solutions to a problem grows very quickly with the size of the problem, exhibiting exponential growth. For very large problems, the amount of DNA required will be too large to be practical. Thus, DNA computing does not provide any new capabilities from the standpoint of computational complexity theory, the study of which computational problems are difficult.
Computer scientists, chemists, molecular biologists, physicists and microsystem engineers are working together to produce both a technological platform and theoretical framework for feasible and evolvable molecular computation.
Although the massive parallelism of DNA in solution is impressive (more than 1020 bytes of active memory per liter) and the energy consumption is very low, the ultimate attraction of DNA-Computers is their potential to design new hardware solutions to problems.
Computer scientists, chemists, molecular biologists, physicists and microsystem engineers are working together to produce both a technological platform and theoretical framework for an effective use of molecular computation.
DNA sequencing is part of the task of cracking the genetic code of interesting organisms as diverse as the pneumonia bug, the tomato and the human body to discover more about the way they function.
DNAcomputing took a leap forwards in 1994 when Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California used DNA to solve a problem commonly known as the travelling salesman problem.
DNAcomputing research was inspired by the similarity between the way DNA works and the operation of a theoretical device known as a Turing machine and named after the British mathematician Alan Turing.
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