March 31, 2013
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online
Researchers at Stanford University have developed a basic computer using genetic material, according to a report in the journal Science.
The team said that the tiny biological transistors they have developed could potentially revolutionize medicine in the future.
Were going to be able to put computers into any living cell you want, lead author Drew Endy explained to the San Jose Mercury News. Were not going to replace the silicon computers. Were not going to replace your phone or your laptop. But were going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work.
Endy, who came to Stanford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founded the BioBricks Foundation, which supports free-to-use standards and technologies for engineering biology.
Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory were going to be able to do that, said Endy.
For example, gene-based biological computers could determine if a certain toxin is present inside a cell or react to treatment within an individual cell.
Traditional transistors that are found in conventional computers control the flow of electrons in the form of the zeros and ones of binary code, the most basic machine language. Arranging multiple transistors together forms something called a logic gate, which serves as the basic building block of all computations performed by computers around the world.
The Stanford genetic transistors, which theyve dubbed transcriptors, use enzymes to manage the flow of RNA proteins along a strand of DNA, similar to the way a computer would use silicon transistors. Using about 150 letters of genetic code, the transcriptors could make a yes-or-no decision, such as determining if mercury is present within the cell.
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Biological Transistors Could Revolutionize The Future Of Medicine