Scientists Create Biomolecular Computing Device with Bacterial Phenotype Output

A group of scientists from Israel’s Technion developed a biological system that functions as a simple computational device:

Technion scientists have developed a biological computer, composed entirely of DNA molecules and enzymes that can generate a biological phenomenon. For the first time the output of a molecular computation process has resulted in a visible property of an organism. In this study it was the color of bacteria colony, either blue or white. This research, which was carried out by Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry together with graduate students Elizaveta Kossoy and Michal Soreni-Harari, and Prof. Yuval Shoham and Dr. Noa Lavid of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, are published this week in the Journal ChemBioChem: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cbic.200700180
“The ever-increasing interest in bio-molecular computing devices has not arisen from the hope that such machines could ever compete with their electronic counterparts by offering greater computation speed, fidelity and power or performance in traditional computing tasks”, explains Prof. Ehud Keinan. “The main advantage of autonomous biomolecular computing devices over the electronic computers arises from their ability to interact directly with biological systems and even with living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.”
Prof. Keinan explains that a computer is, by definition, a machine made of four components: hardware, software, input and output. All of the currently known computers are electronic computers, namely, machines in which both input and output are electronic signals, the hardware is a complex composition of metallic and plastic components, wires, transistors, etc., and the software is a sequence of instructions given to the machine in the form of electronic signals. “In contrast to electronic computers, there are computing machines in which all four components are nothing but molecules,” says Prof. Keinan. “For example, all biological systems, and even entire living organisms, are such computers. Every one of us is a bio-molecular computer, that is, a machine in which all four components are molecules “talking” to one another in a logical manner. The hardware and software are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical work. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, predetermined changes, following a specific set of rules (software) and the outcome of this chemical computation process, the output, is another well defined molecule.”
“The recent work demonstrates that an appropriately designed computing machine (finite automaton) can produce an output signal in the form of a specific biological function via direct interaction with living organisms…”

Press release: Technion Scientists Develop Biological Computer that Determines the Color of Bacteria …
(We would like to thank Professor Ehud Keinan for providing us the picture.)
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