Theoretical and Experimental DNA Computation

Authors: Nataša Jonoska

Publish Date: 2006/08/29

Volume: 7, Issue: 3, Pages: 287-291

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Abstract

The subject of the book biomolecular computing also known as DNA computing has been a subject for research and scientific conversations for a little over a decade One of the first suggestions for using DNA for computation ripened in the mid 80s with the theoretical model of splicing systems introduced by T Head 12 These ideas came to full power with Adlemans seminal experiment in 1994 1 Adleman solved a small combinatorial problem using solely DNA molecules and biomolecular laboratory techniques The problem he chose was a well known NPcomplete problem the Hamiltonian path problem This is one of the generally “intractable” problems in the sense that even for a relatively modest size of a graph in general an impractical amount of computer time is needed for its solution Adlemans approach was not much different from bruteforce search However the way it was encoded and solved the use of massive parallelism selfassembly and the use of nondeterminismmade it

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