4 ms·

Will DNA be Turing Complete? :) Not the same, but quite related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNSpMhJLvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JNSpMhJLvg

• udp 11y ago
  > Will DNA be Turing Complete? :) Actually... quite possibly. Check out the first slide in [1]. You can basically build genetic logic gates using promoters to conditionally (i.e. depending on the presence of light, a protein, etc.) produce a protein to induce or repress another promoter, thereby increasing or decreasing the expression of another gene. It's still pretty early stages and there are a lot of factors that make this more complicated (life isn't binary), but the ultimate goal of synthetic biology is to be able to program DNA in the same way you might program a computer. [1] http://co.mbine.org/events/COMBINE_2015/agenda?q=system/files/combine2015-Utah_101615_v3.pdf http://co.mbine.org/events/COMBINE_2015/agenda?q=system/file...
• dekhn 11y ago
  Yes, DNA (with a combination of some enzymes) is capable of universal computation. So far, this has not turned out to be anything particularly interesting from an engineering standpoint,
• crusso 11y ago
  Will DNA be Turing Complete? DNA (with supporting cell machinery) create us, so...
• cge 11y ago
  Yes, even without enzymes and cells. I have DNA crystallization based tiling systems that can implement essentially arbitrary 1d cellular automata and could implement Turing machines directly. People have implemented neural networks with branch-migration-based systems, and DNA gates can be used to implement systems of logic gates and a wide class of chemical reaction networks. There's a whole field of DNA and molecular computing.