On the computational power of DNA
Discrete Applied Mathematics - Special volume on computational molecular biology
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Molecular (or DNA) computing is founded on the idea that, given enough strands of DNA, and using certain biological operations one use DNA molecules to simulate some classic computations efficiently. The original insight is due to Leonard Adleman (1994) who showed how DNA can be used to solve the Directed Hamiltonian Path (DHP) graph problem (see GRAPH THEORY). Then Richard Lipton (1995) showed how to use DNA to solve more general problems, namely to find satisfying assignments for arbitrary Boolean formulas (see BOOLEAN ALGEBRA). Lipton's approach shows that DNA can be used to solve a large class of combinatorial search problems. Since then there have been many new ideas on DNA computation. In this article we review some of these proposals.