Dna Computers

DNA Computer can store billions of times more information then your PC hard drive and solve complex problems in a less time. We know that computer chip manufacturers are racing to make the next microprocessor that will more faster. Microprocessors made of silicon will eventually reach their limits of speed and miniaturization. Chips makers need a new material to produce faster computing speeds.

To understand DNA computing lets first examine how the conventional computer process information. A conventional computer performs mathematical operations by using electrical impulses to manipulate zeroes and ones on silicon chips. A DNA computer is based on the fact the information is “encoded” within deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as patterns of molecules known as nucleotides. By manipulating the

how the nucleotides combine with each other the DNA computer can be made to process data. The branch of computers dealing with DNA computers is called DNA Computing.

The concept of DNA computing was born in 1993, when Professor Leonard Adleman, a mathematician specializing in computer science and cryptography accidentally stumble upon the similarities between conventional computers and DNA while reading a book by James Watson. A little more than a year after this, in 1994, Leonard M. Adleman, a professor at the University of Southern California, created a storm of excitement in the computing world when he announced that he had solved a famous computation problem. This computer solved the traveling salesman problem also known as the “Hamiltonian path" problem, which is explained later. DNA was shown to have massively parallel processing capabilities that might allow a DNA based computer to solve hard computational problems in a reasonable amount of time.

There was nothing remarkable about the problem itself, which dealt with finding the shortest route through a series of points. Nor was there anything special about how long it took Adleman to solve it — seven days — substantially greater than the few minutes it would take an average person to find a solution. What was exciting about Adleman’s achievement was that he had solved the problem using nothing but deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and molecular chemistry.

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