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DNA-based computation is a novel and exciting recent development at the interface of computer science and molecular biology. This idea of computing through DNA molecules is due to the seminal work of Adleman, who showed how techniques and chemistry of molecular biology may be applied for obtaining the solution of a computationally intractable problem. We can think of a strand of DNA as a sequence of characters chosen from a four-letter alphabet {A,T,C,G} in the same way that electronic computers use a two-letter alphabet. The general principle of extant DNA computation is to first generate a random set of strands in which solutions to a given problem occur with high probability. The computation then proceeds by using standard manipulation techniques to isolate those that are solutions. It has been shown by many research accomplishments that any process that could naturally be described as an algorithm can be realized by DNA computation. Computing with DNA offers the advantage of massive degrees of miniaturization and parallelism. The advantages of DNA computation are unbelievable. The fastest supercomputers in existence today are capable of executing around a trillion operations a second. DNA computers have the potential to execute more than a thousand trillion operations per second as well as being a billion times more efficient and requiring a trillionth of the space needed by existing storage media. Thus, the days are not far away when a large class of difficult and computationally intensive problems might be best solved not by pushing electrons through wires in a computing laboratory, but by mixing solutions in test tubes in a molecular biology laboratory. |
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