US scientists develop bio-computer to decipher DNA chip images

According to an American physicist organization network February 8 (http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/17197.html "> Beijing Time"), Scientists at the Scripps Institute of California and the Israel Institute of Technology have developed a biological computer that can now be used to decipher encrypted images stored in DNA chips. This is the first time to demonstrate a molecular image cipher system based on DNA computing. The relevant papers are published in the latest issue of Applied Chemistry.

The

Electronic computer consists of 4 parts of hardware, software, input and output, the input and output of which are electrical signals, hardware is a complex combination of metal, plastic, wire, transistor, software is a series of electronic signal form of machine instruction. And the 4 parts of biological computer are all molecules, all biological systems and even the entire organic community, everyone is a bio-molecular computer, its hardware and software are complex biological molecules, the molecules can be a logical "talk". They activate each other and perform a predetermined chemical reaction. The input is a specially predetermined molecule, followed by a special set of rules (software), and the output of this chemical calculation process is another well-defined molecule.

A newly developed biological computer is a combination of chemicals and a tube containing a solution that mixes various small DNA molecules, selected DNA enzymes, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate). "It's a clear solution, you can't see anything." "When molecules start interacting, we can wait for results," said Ahud Conan, a professor at the Israeli Institute of Technology who led the study. You can also adjust the DNA and DNA enzymes in the mixture to change the process to get the desired results. "

The biological computer is designed according to the Turing machine's model, and the operation of Turing machines is very similar to the DNA chain. Reading starts from one letter to another, and performs 4 steps at each site: reading the letter; Substituting the letter with another letter; changing its internal form; moving to the next position. A instruction sheet is a translation rule or translation software that indicates these operations. "Our equipment is a simplified version of the Turing machine." Conan said.

Conan also points out that, for traditional computing tasks, computers are faster and more reliable, and the main advantage of biological computers is their biological properties. People can encrypt a lot of information stored in the DNA chip, the biological computer processing a single step although slower than the electronic computer, but it can handle trillions of of chemical steps in parallel, so that the overall calculation process is very fast. "This technology allows us to print millions of pixels in a chip that, after being encrypted, can store an astronomical number of images." "

In addition, this device can interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms, because there is no interface between the 4 components of the molecular computer, and the molecules in the solution react in a waterfall-like manner according to the programmed procedure.