34 / 79
Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Friday Speaker Abstracts
29
Doing Maths with Autonomous Biological Agents
Dan Nicolau, Jr.
Molecular Sense, Ltd, Wallasey, United Kingdom.
Electronic computers are very good at performing a high number of operations at very high
speeds - one-at-a-time. As a result, they struggle with combinatorial tasks that can be only be
practically solved if many operations are performed in parallel. This has led to ideas about
harnessing the parallelism inherent in biological signal processing for producing a new kind of
computing system, such as DNA and molecular computing. In recent work, we presented a
proof-of-concept for a parallel molecular-motor driven computer that solves a classic
"combinatorial" NP-complete problem - Subset Sum. The device consists of a specifically
designed, nanostructured network explored by a large number of molecular-motor-driven,
protein filaments. This system is highly energy efficient, avoiding the heating issues limiting
electronic computers. In this talk, we will discuss the potential and the challenges involved in
developing this kind of technology and how it might be able to tackle problem classes that vex
existing computational devices