Technion scientists have developed a biological computer, composed entirely of DNA molecules and enzymes constructed on a gold-coated chip. This new computer represents a significant improvement over the original computer reported three years ago in a joint paper by Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Technion and a group from the Weizmann Institute of Science, which included Yaakov Benenson, Prof. Ehud Shapiro and Prof. Zvi Livneh. The Technion researchers succeeded in increasing the level of complexity of their computer. Whereas the original computer could accept up to 765 different programs, the new computer can accept as many as 1 billion programs. This increase represents a dramatic advance in terms of the potential mathematical operations and complexity of problems that may be solved using a biological computer. The results are published this week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn equally significant breakthrough is the incorporation of chips as an integral part of the computer\u201d, explains Prof. Ehud Keinan, Dean of the Technion\u2019s Faculty of Chemistry, who carried out this research together with graduate students Michal Soreni, Sivan Yogev, Elizaveta Kossoy, and Prof. Yuval Shoham, Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. \u201cThe chip allows for automatic, real-time readout of the computation results, with no need to employ elaborate techniques of molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis and the use of radioactively labeled materials. Computation on a chip allows efficient parallel computation with many, geographically labeled input molecules. Such computers could have a variety of practical applications, including encryption of information. For example, it would be possible to encrypt images on a chip, whereby deciphering the images would be possible only by a person with access to a secret key comprised of several short DNA molecules and several enzymes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prof. Keinan explains that a computer is, by definition, a machine made of four components: hardware, software, input and output. All of the currently known computers are electronic computers, namely, machines in which both input and output are electronic signals, the hardware is a complex composition of metallic and plastic components, wires, transistors, etc., and the software is a sequence of instructions given to the machine in the form of electronic signals. \u201cIn contrast to electronic computers, there are computing machines in which all four components are nothing but molecules,\u201d says Prof. Keinan. \u201cFor example, all biological systems, and even entire living organisms, are such computers. Every one of us is a bio-molecular computer, that is, a machine in which all four components are molecules \u201ctalking\u201d to one another in a logical manner. The hardware and software are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical work. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, predetermined changes, following a specific set of rules (software) and the outcome of this chemical computation process, the output, is another well defined molecule.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the past decade, bio-molecular computers have aroused much interest in the scientific community due to of their ability to carry out an enormous number of operations in parallel. A tiny drop of solution containing a large number of input molecules contains enormous computational power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"