Complicated systems cannot survive the rigors of a chaotic environment, without balancing mechanisms that sense, decide upon and counteract the exerted disturbances. Especially so with living organisms, forced by competition to incredible complexities, escalating also their self-controlling plight. Therefore, they compute.
Can we harness biological mechanisms to create artificial computing systems? Biology offers several levels of design abstraction: molecular machines, cells, organisms... ranging from the more easily-defined to the more inherently complex. At the bottom of this stack we find the nucleic acids, RNA and DNA, with their digital structure and relatively precise interactions. They are central enablers of designing artificial biological systems, in the confluence of engineering and biology, that we call Synthetic biology.
In the first part, let us follow their trail towards an overview of building computing machines with molecules -- and in the second part, take the case study of iGEM Greece 2017, a student team which made an RNA computer to identify and selectively kill cancer cells.
Links
1. Y. Benenson, Biomolecular computing systems: principles, progress and potential, Nature Reviews Genetics (2012)
2. L. Adleman, Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems, Science (1994)
3. iGEM Greece 2017 project site
4. Microsoft research: programming DNA
