Amazing stuff! Silicon is not the only stuff computers are made of! This could be a breakthrough!
"... In recent years engineers have explored a subtly new role for the molecule's unique capabilities, as the basis for a biological computer. Yet in spite of the passing of 30 years since the first prototype, most DNA computers have struggled to process more than a few tailored algorithms.
A team researchers from China has now come up with a DNA integrated circuit (DIC) that's far more general purpose. Their liquid computer's gates can form an astonishing 100 billion circuits, showing its versatility with each capable of running its own program.
DNA computing has the potential to create machines that offer significant leaps in speeds and capacities, and – as with quantum computing – there are various approaches that can be taken. Here, scientists wanted to build something that was more adaptable than previous efforts, with a broader range of potential uses. ...
What's more, the experimental systems showed little in the way of signal attenuation, or the gradual loss of the strength of a signal as it travels. That's another key part of being able to build DNA computers that can scale and adapt. ..."
From the abstract:
"The past decades have witnessed the evolution of electronic and photonic integrated circuits, from application specific to programmable. Although liquid-phase DNA circuitry holds the potential for massive parallelism in the encoding and execution of algorithms, the development of general-purpose DNA integrated circuits (DICs) has yet to be explored. Here we demonstrate a DIC system by integration of multilayer DNA-based programmable gate arrays (DPGAs). We find that the use of generic single-stranded oligonucleotides as a uniform transmission signal can reliably integrate large-scale DICs with minimal leakage and high fidelity for general-purpose computing. Reconfiguration of a single DPGA with 24 addressable dual-rail gates can be programmed with wiring instructions to implement over 100 billion distinct circuits. Furthermore, to control the intrinsically random collision of molecules, we designed DNA origami registers to provide the directionality for asynchronous execution of cascaded DPGAs. We exemplify this by a quadratic equation-solving DIC assembled with three layers of cascade DPGAs comprising 30 logic gates with around 500 DNA strands. We further show that integration of a DPGA with an analog-to-digital converter can classify disease-related microRNAs. The ability to integrate large-scale DPGA networks without apparent signal attenuation marks a key step towards general-purpose DNA computing."
DNA-based programmable gate arrays for general-purpose DNA computing (no public access)
Computing functions were matched to DNA molecules in a test tube.
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