By Paige Johnson, Nick Brynelson, and Joseph Kim

Everyday biological electronics and computing becomes more feasible and necessary.

As modern computers reach their limits, DNA computers would make faster computation still possible.

DNA “electronics” would be much smaller than our current system.

The idea of biological electronics has only emerged in the last ten years.

A DNA computer is a computer which uses DNA to perform calculations and store memory

A biological electronic is a device made out of biological components which parallels an electronic circuit and gets work done

An example of the Seven City Traveling Salesman Problem

In 1994 Leonard Adleman of USC created a DNA computer which could find the shortest possible path between seven cities where each city is visited once (also called the “traveling salesmen problem”).

Laura Landweber of Princeton University conducted a study of the microscopic organisms, Ciliates, which thrive in pond water. She discovered in 1997 that Ciliates use complex computations to separate their “junk” DNA from their useful DNA and have been doing so for millions of years.

Microscopic Cilia

In the years to come biological components which mirrored the electronic components of today were created. Michael Elowitz of Cal Tech and Stanislas Leibler of Rockefeller University succeeded in making a genetic clock from scratch and a genetic circuit which played rock paper scissors.

In 2000 a biological oscillator called the repressilator was made along with a toggle switch, a feedback loop, and other components.

This picture is of E. Coli printing the message hello world.

Uri Sivan is a professor at Technion - The Israeli Institute of Technology

He has co-created a self assembling nano-transistor that uses DNA to assemble itself

The DNA is attached to carbon nanotubes which act as transistors when metallicaly coated

Milan Stojanovic is a co-researcher and creator of the MAYA 2- a tick tack toe playing game which uses a DNA computer

Milan is a professor at the University of Columbia

His team made biological logic gates which take two inputs and release an output

DNA is plentiful DNA is cheap DNA can hold an extremely large amount

of data A DNA computer would be smaller than

ever A DNA computer can perform many

calculations at once while a regular silicon computer can only perform one