tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca-fr/topics/dna-computing-19965/articlesDNA computing – La Conversation2017-07-28T03:08:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/782262017-07-28T03:08:36Z2017-07-28T03:08:36ZStoring data in DNA brings nature into the digital universe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179866/original/file-20170726-28585-x4xan9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The next frontier of data storage: DNA.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/dna-molecules-binary-code-3d-render-255618778">ymgerman/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Humanity is producing data at an unimaginable rate, to the point that storage technologies can’t keep up. Every five years, the amount of data we’re producing increases <a href="https://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/index.htm">10-fold</a>, including photos and videos. Not all of it needs to be stored, but manufacturers of data storage aren’t making hard drives and flash chips fast enough to <a href="http://www.seagate.com/our-story/data-age-2025/">hold what we do want to keep</a>. Since we’re not going to stop taking pictures and recording movies, we need to develop new ways to save them.</p>
<p>Over millennia, nature has evolved an incredible information storage medium – DNA. It evolved to store genetic information, blueprints for building proteins, but DNA can be used for many more purposes than just that. DNA is also much denser than modern storage media: The data on hundreds of thousands of DVDs could fit inside a <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11875">matchbox-size package of DNA</a>. DNA is also much more durable – <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201411378">lasting thousands of years</a> – than today’s hard drives, which may last <a href="https://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for">years or decades</a>. And while hard drive formats and connection standards become obsolete, DNA never will, at least so long as there’s life.</p>
<p>The idea of storing digital data in DNA is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage">several decades old</a>, but recent work from <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1226355">Harvard</a> and the <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11875">European Bioinformatics Institute</a> showed that progress in modern DNA manipulation methods could make it both possible and practical today. Many research groups, including at the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201411378">ETH Zurich</a>, the <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep14138">University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</a> and <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaj2038">Columbia University</a> are working on this problem. Our <a href="http://misl.cs.washington.edu/">own group</a> at the University of Washington and Microsoft <a href="https://www.washington.edu/news/2016/07/07/uw-microsoft-researchers-break-record-for-dna-data-storage/">holds the world record</a> for the amount of data successfully stored in and retrieved from DNA – 200 megabytes.</p>
<h2>Preparing bits to become atoms</h2>
<p>Traditional media like hard drives, thumb drives or DVDs store digital data by changing either the <a href="https://www.extremetech.com/computing/88078-how-a-hard-drive-works">magnetic</a>, <a href="http://computer.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm">electrical</a> or <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1820962,00.asp">optical properties</a> of a material to store 0s and 1s.</p>
<p>To store data in DNA, the concept is the same, but the process is different. DNA molecules are long sequences of smaller molecules, called nucleotides – adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine, usually designated as A, C, T and G. Rather than creating sequences of 0s and 1s, as in electronic media, DNA storage uses sequences of the nucleotides.</p>
<p>There are several ways to do this, but the general idea is to assign digital data patterns to DNA nucleotides. For instance, 00 could be equivalent to A, 01 to C, 10 to T and 11 to G. To store a picture, for example, we start with its encoding as a digital file, like a JPEG. That file is, in essence, a long string of 0s and 1s. Let’s say the first eight bits of the file are 01111000; we break them into pairs – 01 11 10 00 – which correspond to C-G-T-A. That’s the order in which we join the nucleotides to form a DNA strand. </p>
<p>Digital computer files can be quite large – <a href="https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/332069/what-is-a-realistic-real-world-maximum-size-for-a-sqlite-database">even terabytes in size for large databases</a>. But individual DNA strands have to be much shorter – holding only about 20 bytes each. That’s because the longer a DNA strand is, the harder it is to build chemically. </p>
<p>So we need to break the data into smaller chunks, and add to each an indicator of where in the sequence it falls. When it’s time to read the DNA-stored information, that indicator will ensure all the chunks of data stay in their proper order.</p>
<p>Now we have a plan for how to store the data. Next we have to actually do it.</p>
<h2>Storing the data</h2>
<p>After determining what order the letters should go in, the DNA sequences are manufactured letter by letter with chemical reactions. These reactions are driven by equipment that takes in bottles of A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s and mixes them in a liquid solution with other chemicals to control the reactions that specify the order of the physical DNA strands.</p>
<p>This process brings us another benefit of DNA storage: backup copies. Rather than making one strand at a time, the chemical reactions make many identical strands at once, before going on to make many copies of the next strand in the series.</p>
<p>Once the DNA strands are created, we need to protect them against damage from <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201411378">humidity and light</a>. So we dry them out and put them in a container that keeps them cold and blocks water and light. </p>
<p>But stored data are useful only if we can retrieve them later.</p>
<h2>Reading the data back</h2>
<p>To read the data back out of storage, we use a sequencing machine exactly like those used for analysis of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing">genomic DNA in cells</a>. This identifies the molecules, generating a letter sequence per molecule, which we then decode into a binary sequence of 0s and 1s in order. This process can destroy the DNA as it is read – but that’s where those backup copies come into play: There are many copies of each sequence.</p>
<p>And if the backup copies get depleted, it is easy to make duplicate copies to refill the storage – just as nature <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction">copies DNA all the time</a>.</p>
<p>At the moment, most DNA retrieval systems require reading all of the information stored in a particular container, even if we want only a small amount of it. This is like reading an entire hard drive’s worth of information just to find one email message. We have developed techniques – based on <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1700278">well-studied biochemistry methods</a> – that let us <a href="https://doi.org/10.1101/114553">identify and read</a> only the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872362.2872397">specific pieces of information</a> a user needs to retrieve from DNA storage.</p>
<h2>Remaining challenges</h2>
<p>At present, DNA storage is experimental. Before it becomes commonplace, it needs to be completely automated, and the processes of both building DNA and reading it must be improved. They are both prone to error and relatively slow. For example, today’s DNA synthesis lets us write a few <a href="https://synbiobeta.com/time-new-dna-synthesis-sequencing-cost-curves-rob-carlson/">hundred bytes per second</a>; a modern hard drive can write <a href="https://www.lifewire.com/what-are-read-and-write-speeds-2640236">hundreds of millions of bytes per second</a>. An average iPhone photo would take several hours to store in DNA, though it takes less than a second to save on the phone or transfer to a computer. </p>
<p>These are significant challenges, but we are optimistic because all the relevant technologies are improving rapidly. Further, DNA data storage doesn’t need the perfect accuracy that biology requires, so researchers are likely to find even cheaper and faster ways to store information in nature’s oldest data storage system.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78226/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luis Ceze works for University of Washington and consults for Microsoft Research. He receives funding from Microsoft, NSF and DARPA.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karin Strauss works for Microsoft Research and is an affiliate faculty member at University of Washington. She is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and an Executive Committee member of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH). </span></em></p>Researchers who hold the world record for storing and retrieving data in DNA explain how the building blocks of life can be used to hold digital information as well.Luis Ceze, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of WashingtonKarin Strauss, Researcher in Computer Architecture, Microsoft Research; Affiliate Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/605802016-06-07T12:21:14Z2016-06-07T12:21:14ZFrom living computers to nano-robots: how we’re taking DNA beyond genetics<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125408/original/image-20160606-13045-ea307k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Molecular computer</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>DNA is one of the most amazing molecules in nature, providing a way to carry the instructions needed to create almost any lifeform on Earth in a microscopic package. Now scientists are finding ways to push DNA even further, using it not just to store information but to create physical components in a range of biological machines.</p>
<p><a href="https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/dna">Deoxyribonucleic acid or “DNA”</a> carries the genetic information that we, and all living organisms, use to function. It typically comes in the form of the famous double-helix shape, made up of two single-stranded DNA molecules folded into a spiral. Each of these is made up of a series of four different types of molecular component: adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C).</p>
<p>Genes are made up from different sequences of these building block components, and the order in which they appear in a strand of DNA is what encodes genetic information. But by precisely designing different A,G,T and C sequences, scientists have recently been able to develop new ways of <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7082/abs/nature04586.html">folding DNA</a> into different origami shapes, beyond the conventional double helix.</p>
<p>This approach has opened up new possibilities of using DNA beyond its genetic and biological purpose, turning it into a Lego-like material for building objects that are just a few billionths of a metre in diameter (nanoscale). DNA-based materials are now being used for a variety of applications, ranging from templates for electronic nano-devices, to ways of precisely carrying drugs to diseased cells.</p>
<h2>DNA-based nanothermometers</h2>
<p>Designing electronic devices that are just nanometres in size opens up all sorts of <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-nanotechnology-is-securing-your-future-55254">possible applications</a> but makes it harder to spot defects. As a way of dealing with this, researchers at the University of Montreal have used DNA to create ultrasensitive <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b00156">nanoscale thermometers</a> that could help find minuscule hotspots in nanodevices (which would indicate a defect). They could also be used to monitor the temperature inside living cells.</p>
<p>The nanothermometers are made using loops of DNA that act as switches, folding or unfolding in response to temperature changes. This movement can be detected by attaching optical probes to the DNA. The researchers now want to build these nanothermometers into larger DNA devices that can work inside the human body.</p>
<h2>Biological nanorobots</h2>
<p>Researchers at Harvard Medical School have used DNA to <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/335/6070/831">design and build</a> a nanosized robot that acts as a drug delivery vehicle to target specific cells. The nanorobot comes in the form of an open barrel made of DNA, whose two halves are connected by a hinge held shut by special DNA handles. These handles can recognise combinations of specific proteins present on the surface of cells, including ones associated with diseases. </p>
<p>When the robot comes into contact with the right cells, it opens the container and delivers its cargo. When applied to a mixture of healthy and cancerous human blood cells, these robots showed the ability to target and kill half of the cancer cells, while the healthy cells were left unharmed.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125402/original/image-20160606-13074-12bg2xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">DNA barrel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/40848.php">Campbell Strong, Shawn Douglas, & Gaël McGill</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Bio-computers in living animals</h2>
<p>Because DNA structures can act as switches, moving from one position to another and back again, they can be used to perform the logical operations that make computer calculations possible. Researchers at Harvard and Bar-Ilan University in Israel have used this principle to build different nanoscale robots that can interact with each other, using their DNA switches to react to and produce different signals.</p>
<p>What’s more, the scientists <a href="http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v9/n5/full/nnano.2014.58.html">implanted the robots</a> into a living animal, in this instance a cockroach. This allowed them to develop a novel type of biological computer that can control the delivery of therapeutic molecules inside the cockroach by switching elements of their structure “on” or “off”. A trial of these DNA nanorobots is now scheduled to <a href="http://singularityhub.com/2015/01/08/can-dna-nanobots-successfully-treat-cancer-patient-first-human-trial-soon/">take place in humans</a>.</p>
<h2>Light-harvesting antennas</h2>
<p>As well as creating minuscule machines, DNA can provide a way for us to copy natural processes at the nanoscale. For example, nature can capture energy from the sun using photosynthesis to convert light into chemical energy, which acts as fuel for plants and other organisms (and the animals that eat them). Researchers at Arizona State University and the University of British Columbia have now built a three-arm DNA structure that can <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja509018g">capture and transfer light</a> that mimics this process.</p>
<p>Photosynthesis occurs in living organisms thanks to tiny antennas made up of a large number of pigment molecules at specific orientations and distances from each other, which are able to absorb visible light. The artificial DNA-based structures act as similar antennas, controlling the position of specific dye molecules that absorb the light energy and channel it to a reaction centre where it is converted into chemical energy. This work could pave the way for devices capable of more efficiently using the most abundant source of energy we have at our disposal: sunlight.</p>
<p>So what’s next for DNA nanotechnology? It is hard to know but, with DNA, nature has given us a very versatile tool. It is now up to us to make the best use of it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60580/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matteo Palma receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Research Council and the Royal Society of Chemistry.</span></em></p>Scientists are using DNA to build exciting new nanotechnologies that could change everything from electronics to energy.Matteo Palma, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/463642015-09-03T05:36:27Z2015-09-03T05:36:27ZOrganic ‘computers’ made of DNA could process data inside our bodies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93527/original/image-20150901-13419-1gcqkwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Will we see DNA in the mainframe?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/en/medicine-biology-healthcare-dna-163707/">PublicDomainPictures</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We invariably imagine electronic devices to be made from silicon chips, with which computers store and process information as binary digits (zeros and ones) represented by tiny electrical charges. But it need not be this way: among the alternatives to silicon are organic mediums such as DNA.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.britannica.com/technology/DNA-computing">DNA computing</a> was first demonstrated in 1994 by <a href="http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/papers/fp-sciam98.pdf">Leonard Adleman</a> who encoded and solved the <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TravelingSalesmanProblem.html">travelling salesman problem</a>, a maths problem to find the most efficient route for a salesman to take between hypothetical cities, entirely in DNA. </p>
<p>Deoxyribonucleaic acid, DNA, can store vast amounts of information encoded as sequences of the molecules, known as nucleotides, cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T). The complexity and enormous variance of different species’ genetic codes demonstrates how much information can be stored within DNA encoded using CGAT, and this capacity can be put to use in computing. DNA molecules can be used to process information, using a bonding process between DNA pairs known as hybridisation. This takes single strands of DNA as input and produces subsequent strands of DNA through transformation as output.</p>
<p>Since Adleman’s experiment, many DNA-based “circuits” have been proposed that implement computational methods such as <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5805/1585.abstract">Boolean logic</a>, <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1196.abstract">arithmetical formulas</a>, and <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7356/full/nature10262.html">neural network computation</a>. Called <a href="http://www.caltech.edu/news/team-led-caltech-wins-second-10-million-award-research-molecular-programming-40276">molecular programming</a>, this approach applies concepts and designs customary to computing to nano-scale approaches appropriate for working with DNA. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93526/original/image-20150901-13405-7sweyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">It’s circuitry, but not as we know it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Caltech/Lulu Qian</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In this sense “programming” is really biochemistry. The “programs” created are in fact methods of selecting molecules that interact in a way that achieves a specific result through the process of DNA self-assembly, where disordered collections of molecules will spontaneously interact to form the desired arrangement of strands of DNA.</p>
<h2>DNA ‘robots’</h2>
<p>DNA can also be used to control motion, allowing for DNA-based nano-mechanical devices. This was first achieved by <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6796/abs/406605a0.html">Bernard Yurke and colleagues</a> in 2000, who created from DNA strands a pair of tweezers that opened and pinched. Later experiments such as by <a href="http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v7/n3/full/nnano.2011.253.html">Shelley Wickham and colleagues</a> in 2011 and at <a href="http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/research/self-assembled-structures-and-devices">Andrew Turberfield’s lab at Oxford</a> demonstrated nano-molecular walking machines made entirely from DNA that could traverse set routes. </p>
<p>One possible application is that such a nano-robot DNA walker could progress along tracks making decisions and signal when reaching the end of the track, indicating computation has finished. Just as electronic circuits are printed onto circuit boards, DNA molecules could be used to print similar tracks arranged into logical decision trees on a DNA tile, with enzymes used to control the decision branching along the tree, causing the walker to take one track or another.</p>
<p>DNA walkers can also carry molecular cargo, and so could be used to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17058066">deliver drugs inside the body</a>.</p>
<h2>Why DNA computing?</h2>
<p>DNA molecules’ many appealing features include their size (2nm width), programmability and high storage capacity – much greater than their silicon counterparts. DNA is also versatile, cheap and easy to synthesise, and computing with DNA requires much less energy than electric powered silicon processors. </p>
<p>Its drawback is speed: it currently takes several hours to compute the square root of a four digit number, something that a traditional computer could compute in a hundredth of a second. Another drawback is that DNA circuits are single-use, and need to be recreated to run the same computation again.</p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest advantage of DNA over electronic circuits is that it can interact with its biochemical environment. Computing with molecules involves recognising the presence or absence of certain molecules, and so a natural application of DNA computing is to bring such programmability into the realm of environmental biosensing, or delivering medicines and therapies inside living organisms. </p>
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<p>DNA programs have already been put to medical uses, such as <a href="http://news.utexas.edu/2011/12/22/ellington_tuberculosis">diagnosing tuberculosis</a>. Another proposed use is a <a href="http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v8/n10/full/nnano.2013.202.html">nano-biological “program”</a> by Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, termed the “<a href="http://erc.europa.eu/erc-stories/doctor-cell">doctor in the cell</a>” that targets cancer molecules. Other DNA programs for medical applications target lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell), which are defined by the presence or absence of certain cell markers and so can be naturally detected with true/false Boolean logic. However, more effort is required before we can <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4063495">inject smart drugs directly into living organisms</a>. </p>
<h2>Future of DNA computing</h2>
<p>Taken broadly, DNA computation has enormous future potential. Its huge storage capacity, low energy cost, ease of manufacturing that exploits the power of self-assembly and its easy affinity with the natural world are an entry to nanoscale computing, possibly through designs that incorporate both molecular and electronic components. Since its inception, the technology has progressed at great speed, delivering point-of-care diagnostics and proof-of-concept smart drugs – those that can make diagnostic decisions about the type of therapy to deliver. </p>
<p>There are many challenges, of course, that need to be addressed so that the technology can move forward from the proof-of-concept to real smart drugs: the reliability of the DNA walkers, the robustness of DNA self-assembly, and improving drug delivery. But a century of traditional computer science research is well placed to contribute to developing DNA computing through new programming languages, abstractions, and formal verification techniques – techniques that have already revolutionised silicon circuit design, and can help launch organic computing down the same path.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46364/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marta Kwiatkowska receives funding from the European Research Council and previously from Microsoft Research Cambridge.</span></em></p>A DNA-powered PC may not be on the horizon, but DNA can still compute even if it can’t build a computer.Marta Kwiatkowska, Professor of Computing Systems, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.