On the way to the chemical computer
A development environment based on synthetic DNA has been created
According to the principle of operation, digital cameras are like an eye, membrane filters are like a kidney, miniature robots act like a swarm of insects, etc.
Biomimicry is gradually moving from the macro to the micro level. Researchers are trying to copy the principles of how cells and even individual molecular systems work. Among the latter, the most interesting are directly based on DNA.
Deoxyribonucleic acid is rightfully considered a perfect information carrier with a multi-level system for protecting critical data. (We leave this statement on the conscience of the author. In fact, DNA itself has no protection, and the mechanisms of its repair and replication are quite capable of making mistakes, including catastrophic ones – VM.) It encodes complex algorithms for protein synthesis. Through it, the main properties of living organisms are realized – heredity and variability.
At the same time, for chemists and representatives of various technical specialties, it is just a polymer molecule that can be synthesized artificially and encoded with its help almost anything. For example, a year ago at Harvard Medical School, a book "Regeneration: How Synthetic Biology will Lead to a Rethinking of Nature and ourselves" was recorded in a DNA chip.
Such experiments are still isolated, and their authors use their own unique methods each time. Researchers from the University of Washington went further and decided to unify the process, for which they created an entire development environment (Chen et al., Programmable chemical controllers made from DNA).
Living organisms use numerous chemical reactions to explore the surrounding world and regulate the constancy of the internal environment. The development of synthetic systems with similar properties is of interest for medicine and industrial methods using the effect of self-organization. To create them, it is required to design a controller with molecular control circuits, on the basis of which the necessary calculations and actions at the chemical level could be performed. We implemented the computational core of such controllers using the formalism of chemical reaction networks and creating an appropriate programming language.
(Here and further quotes are taken from the press release of the University of Washington UW engineers invent programming language to build synthetic DNA - VM.)
Because of the complementarity property, synthetic DNA can be used to program the execution of an arbitrary set of commands and form a molecular system with certain properties.
Artistic representation of a "chemical computer" performing a molecular program
(image: Yan Liang, L2XY2.com )This approach can be used to create artificial organs in which a molecular system based on synthetic DNA molecules will be able to implement different biological programs depending on current needs.
In clinical practice, such molecular systems can serve as a way to test drugs and their selective delivery to the cells of the affected organ. One of the authors of the work, associate professor of the Laboratory of Experimental Computing technology Excel Georg Seelig (Georg Seelig), describes the role of research:
If you want the computer to do something different, you just run another program on it. Now we can implement a very similar control method at the level of (bio)chemistry.
An example of encoding a chemical program with synthetic DNA fragments (image: Yan Liang, L2XY2.com )In parallel, researchers from the University of Washington have come closer to solving the long-standing problem of efficient processing of analog signals in digital systems:
Our architecture uses synthetic DNA and can perform any mathematical actions. Unlike conventional logic circuits, it allows you to naturally process analog signals, as biological systems do. To reduce errors associated with the assembly of synthetic DNA, controller components can be obtained biologically from plasmid DNA. We created several building blocks for different types of reactions, and then combined them into a network that implements at the molecular level an algorithm used in distributed control systems.
If each component of a digital system has strictly one of two states, encoding a logical unit or zero, then a group of neurons or molecules, as a rule, is in a more complex state, the description of which cannot be reduced to a simple bit sequence without coarsening.
The limited possibilities of simulating living systems with the help of familiar logic circuits inhibits the development of projects such as artificial brains or modeling of biological processes, and many others. With the advent of a synthetic DNA-based development environment, existing barriers will be much easier to overcome.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru02.10.2013