Biological Computing Intro

Walker Wheeler

CS 441 Project Presentation

What Is Biological Computing?

Biological Computing has 2 main sub categories:


The Turing Machine

Turing Machine Demonstration


Xturing machine (Java Applet Example)

DNA Information


The above from John Kyrk's website that animates processes related to DNA. http://www.johnkyrk.com © 2007

DNA and Turing Machines


These observed similarities encouraged investigation of DNA computation.

Adelman and the Traveling Salesman

Leonard Adelman was the first person to actually do BioComputing. While at the University of Southern California, he used DNA to solve an instance of the Traveling Salesman problem.

He used DNA molecules to systematically encode connected cities and combined trillions of these in a test tube. He then took advantage of the pairing affinities to achieve an answer within a few minutes. The downside was that it took much longer at the time to retrieve the combinations representing success.

A DNA based Turing Machine

Molecular Turing Machine Model
This is an abstract model of how the DNA based Turing machine would work.

A DNA based Turing Machine (2)

The following image shows how the enzyme FokI will act as a turing machine and how the various components map to the Turing Machine model in the previous slide.
Molecular Automaton

A DNA based Turing Machine (3)

This image shows how a DNA computer would process it's input. Molecular Automaton

DNA Oragami

Images constructed from DNA Although many seek to advantage of DNA's potential for computational power, some others have a more entertaining use of it. Paul W. K. Rothemund has found yet another use of DNA. He has started to build 2d images out of DNA that only take about 2 weeks from start to finish. Each of the images to the right is only a few hundred nanometers across.

Questions

Any questions?

References