Emerging Paradigms Of DNA Based Computation

Introduction: DNA computing is a novel technology that seeks to capitalize on the enormous informational capacity of DNA, biological molecules that can store huge amounts of information and are able to perform operations similar to that of a computer, through the deployment of enzymes, biological catalysts that act like software to execute desired operations. The appeal of DNA computing lies in the fact that DNA molecules can store far more information than any existing conventional computer chip. Also, utilizing DNA for complex computation can be much faster than utilizing a conventional computer, for which massive parallelism would require large amounts of hardware, not simply more DNA. Scientists have found the new material they need to build the next generation of microprocessors. Millions of natural supercomputers exist inside living organisms, including your body. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules, the material our genes are made of, have the potential to perform calculations many times faster than the world's most powerful human-built computers. DNA might one day be integrated into a computer chip to create a so-called biochip that will push computers even faster. DNA molecules have already been harnessed to perform complex mathematical problems. While still in their infancy, DNA computers will be capable of storing billions of times more data than your personal computer. The practical possibility of using molecules of DNA as a medium for computation was first demonstrated by Adleman in 1994. In 1994, Leonard Adleman took a giant step towards a different kind of chemical or artificial biochemical computer. He used fragments of DNA to compute the solution to a complex graph theory problem. Adleman's method utilizes sequences of DNA's molecular subunits to represent vertices of a network or `"graph". Thus, combinations of these sequences formed randomly by the massively parallel action of biochemical reactions in test tubes described random paths through the graph. Using the tools of biochemistry, Adleman was able to extract the correct answer to the graph theory problem out of the many random paths represented by the product DNA strands. Adleman's primary intention was to prove the feasibility of bio molecular computation but his work also gave an indication that the emergence of this new computational paradigm could provide an advantage over conventional electronic computing techniques. Specifically, DNA was shown to have massively parallel processing capabilities that might allow a DNA based computer to solve hard computational problems in a reasonable amount of time. However, Adleman's brute force search algorithm is not, and was never meant to be, a practical means of solving such problems; the volume of material required was found to increase exponentially as the complexity of the problem was increased. The main idea behind DNA computing is to adopt a biological (wet) technique as an efficient computing vehicle, where data are represented using strands of DNA. Even though a DNA reaction is much slower than the cycle time of a silicon-based computer, the inherently parallel processing offered by the DNA process plays an important role.

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