Digital DNA Circuits

TheSync writes "ScienceNews has a story about digital DNA circuits. The circuits use proteins that activate or deactivate genes on the DNA for control. Since an inverter and an AND gate have been created, any digital logic circuit can now be done in DNA. Moreover, evolution can help make circuit elements work better. There is even a "databook" of BioBricks circuit elements and BioSPICE for biocircuit simulation."

Comments

Re:Oh!

[g4dget]

Transcription and translation happen at about 45 nucleotides per second in bacteria, meaning it takes at least a few seconds to get a signal through a genetic "gate" or "switch".

Re:DNA computing and Cryptography

[Code-Ex]

Try this page

NOT gate

[Bowling Moses]

Sounds similar to work being done by the Arnold group at Caltech. They've apparently (haven't read the article yet) made a NOT gate using directed evolution. They're more interested in developing and applying the directed evolution technique than in biological computers, it seems. Lab website's here. And the lab website's got their own articles available for free in .pdf form. Screw you, Elsevier!

Re:Oh!

[The_K4]

Yes, but if you have several trillion copies of your program you can run them all in parellel. Think of cytography....you could make a bioprogram that's designed to find the 128 bit key. There's 2^128 possible solutions. So if you have a whole bunch of these 2^1000 bio-programs in a solution, you can quickly find the 128 bit key. Look here under DNA computing for an example of why this stuff is useful, even if it is slow compared to silicon.

Re:Oh!

[aqkiva]

The original post of 45 nt/s is correct for transcription and translation (the speed of RNA polymerase and ribosomes). 1000 nt/s is for replication (the speed of DNA polymerase).

Origins of this stuff

[WillWare]

Tom Knight and some other MIT people were talking about this kind of stuff in 1996-97. This was the same group interested in amorphous computing at the time. They saw it all as one big research agenda, and amorphous computing fell under the DOD funding umbrella for autonomous battlefield surveillance widgets.

These guys were poking around with some genuinely interesting ideas. Their idea was that if you relaxed the requirements on manufacturing quality, you could make nodes that were super-cheap with a modest (but today-considered-unacceptable) failure rate. They set forth a collection of programming axioms that treated a sea-of-nodes as a continuous computational "gunk". Very cool stuff.