DNA COMPUTER-The Future of Computing
DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and biochemistry and molecular biology instead of the traditional silicon based computer technologies.DNA computing or more generally molecular computing is a fast developing interdisciplinary area.
In 1994, Leonard Adleman introduced the idea of using DNA to solve complex mathematical problems. Adleman, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, came to the conclusion that DNA had computational potential after reading the book “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” written by James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Adleman is often called the inventor of DNA computers. His article in a 1994 issue of the journal Science outlined how to use DNA to solve a well-known mathematical problem, called the directed Hamilton Path problem, also known as the “traveling salesman” problem. The goal of the problem is to find the shortest route between a number of cities, going through each city only once. As you add more cities to the problem, the problem becomes more difficult. Adleman chose to find the shortest route between seven cities.
Now let us see how the problem is solved by DNA Computation. The Problem is illustrated in the picture.
Thus we hear how it is being solved in Adleman’s own words.
“To simplify the discussion here, consider the map which contains just four cities—Atlanta, Boston,Chicago and Detroit—linked by six ?ights. The problem is to determine the existence of a Hamiltonian path starting in Atlanta and ending in Detroit.I began by assigning a random DNA sequence to each city. In our example,Atlanta becomes ACTTGCAG, Boston TCGGACTG and so on. It was convenient to think of the ?rst half of the DNA sequence as the ?rst name of the
city and the second half as the last name. So Atlanta’s last name is GCAG,whereas.
