“Israeli Scientists have devised a computer that cans perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of fastest super computer, the secret: It runs on DNA.”
Source: National Geographic news18
December 9th,1959 , At the annual meeting of American Physical society at California institute of technology, there was a visionary speech given by R.P.Feynman11 , which described the possibility of building sub-microscopic computers and Later, in 1994, Leonard Adleman1 solved an unremarkable computational problem with remarkable technique, than it seemed to find the way to construct computing machines which would have the capability to perform trillions operations at a time and could hold ten 10 terabytes of data with in one cubic centimetre. Although the problem solved by Adleman was not too complex, anybody could solve it in few moments or any computer machine could solve it in a blink of eyes but it took Adleman, however, seven days to find out the solution of the problem, the reason was he solved problem with the DNA.
Speed of computation and Power consumption are the two main parameters of any computing devices. Conventional computer carry out operations sequentially, which binds the speed of these devices but if you found a mean to carry out operations in parallel then there would be a great improvement in the speed of computing devices. DNA2 has a capability to carry out reactions in parallel so due to this property it possesses massive parallelism and hence, the speed of DNA computer is enormous. A normal pc can execute approximately 106 operations/sec, the fastest super computer currently available can execute approximately 1012operations/sec but under some condition approximately 1020 operations seems entirely reasonable for DNA computers. After the Adleman’s experiment DNA computing has gained its popularity and there are many researchers who are working hard to find a way to replace the silicon based computers with these extremely small , cheap and fast computers. Here we will discuss some basic terms of biology related to DNA, Adleman’s experiment and some important work done by some other researchers, recent updates about DNA computing, advantages and disadvantages , future and some killer applications .
It is clear that the DNA computers or molecular computers have many attractive properties. Some of their properties like extremely dense storage, enormous parallelism, their energy efficiency makes them ideal computer systems, it’s not a here-&-now practical technology20, it’s a pie-in-the-sky research project that needs lot of good ideas, hard work & luck to realize its potential12. As admitted by Prof. Ehud Shapiro, Weizmann institute of science, Israel, to BBC news that it seems to be really difficult to beat electronic computer by DNA computing method in foreseeable future. so a new goal in this field is to try to use DNA computing to do things that traditional computers cannot do.
From the above discussion it can be concluded that presently, DNA computer lies only in the theory, although, in some research institutes21 and universities such as university of southern California with Dr. Adleman, Princeton, Dr. Richard Lipton and his graduate students and other elsewhere are developing new branches in the young field. Advancement are being made in cryptography and Researchers are working on decreasing error in & damage to DNA during computation. But, a functional ‘DNA computer’ of the type that most people are familiar, lies many years in future.
