A fleet of migrating birds, shoals of fish, clouds of fireflies – each a graceful display of coordination and control that makes a swarm stronger than its individual members. Rather than living creatures, these are strands of DNA artificially coloured red and green, coming together in a golden swirl. Each of these ‘nanorobots’ is 1000 times smaller than a firefly. Chemical signals written with DNA (an example of DNA computing) trigger the robots to flock together or break formation. A different swarm responds to bursts of light. While the technology is at an early stage, researchers hope to replicate the power of natural swarms – creating complex shapes and structures that are able to divide labour when set a task. Getting the principles right in the lab is the first step towards artificial muscles, drug-delivering robots and particles that fly through our bodies at the flick of a switch.
Written by John Ankers
Image/video from work by Jakia Jannat Keya and colleagues
Graduate School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Image/video licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-4.0) licence
Published in Nature Communications, January 2018
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That’s right. DNA Computers. Obviously, this is a technology that is still in development, that you won’t find on the shelves of your local Currys next to a Windows 10 PC, and the technology didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
It’s all thanks to a man called Leonard Adleman. He was the one that came up with the idea to solve math problems with them ^. He realised that DNA had this untapped potential after reading “Molecular Biology of the Gene” by James Watson, who we all know is the co-discoverer of DNA structure (yeah, Watson and Crick, who didn’t give credit to the woman who gave the X-Rays, Rosalind Franklin). He realised that DNA was sort of similar to a hard drive, in that it stores permanent information about your genes. So he came up with a way to solve a commonly known math problem with it, the travelling salesman problem.
Here’s how he did it using his test-tube DNA computer:
3 years after this experiment, a team of dedicated researchers at the University of Rochester developed logic gates made of DNA. We should all know what a logic gate is, but if not *insert homemade infographic here*
Logic gates, at the mo, interpret input signals that come from silicon transistors and converts them into an output signal that allows your computer to do the things that it does :)
The DNA logic gates work similarly, but instead of using electrical signals, the logic gates are relying on DNA code. What they do, is they detect ickle fragments of genetic material, (this is the input), shove it all together and make a single output. In an AND gate, two DNA inputs are joined together with a chemical bind and they’re locked in and end to end structure. These logic gates + DNA biochips = BREAKTHROUGH.
The computer components discussed above will take a very long time to develop into a practical, usable DNA computer, but if it ever materialises, it is theorised that it will be more compact, accurate and efficient than anything we’ve got right now.
There are several advantages to using DNA computers rather than the silicone components that make up our conventional computers:
- The supply is renewable as long as there are cellular creatures. When there’s not, we’re dead so it doesn’t matter ;)
- There’s sooo much DNA everywhere. Since there’s so much, it will be a cheap resource :3
- Ew, ew, ew, toxic materials that are used to make microprocessors aren’t needed with DNA microchips :) Clean as a whistle.
- They will be so much smaller! But also hold a butt load more data:)
One pound of DNA has the capacity to store more information than all of the electrical computers EVER BUILT. #mental And what’s more, a DNA computer the size of a teardrop will be more powerful than the world’s supercomputer. The more DNA, the more calculations that can be done at a time.
This is because they do the calculations parallel rather than in a line like conventional computers and therefore can do many at a time without interference.
Also, don’t forget - our brains are just huge DNA computers, basically. The more we know about these, the more we will understand the brain!
The number of nanobots in the study – more than in previous experiments – makes it particularly promising, says Bachelet. “The higher the number of robots present, the more complex the decisions and actions that can be achieved. If you reach a certain threshold of capability, you can perform any kind of computation. In this case, we have gone past that threshold,” he says.
The team says it should be possible to scale up the computing power in the cockroach to that of an 8-bit computer, equivalent to a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 from the 1980s. Goni-Moreno agrees that this is feasible. “The mechanism seems easy to scale up so the complexity of the computations will soon become higher,” he says.
An obvious benefit of this technology would be cancer treatments, because these must be cell-specific and current treatments are not well-targeted. But a treatment like this in mammals must overcome the immune response triggered when a foreign object enters the body.
Bachelet is confident that the team can enhance the robots’ stability so that they can survive in mammals. “There is no reason why preliminary trials on humans can’t start within five years,” he says.
Journal reference: Nature Nanotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.58
It's the start of a new year, and I recently completed a science film for USC's science film competition. It's cool collaborating with other students to produce a short illustrating a scientific concept. The film provides a brief overview of Leonard Adleman’s 1994 research on DNA computing to solve the Hamiltonian Path Problem, aka "The Traveling Salesman Problem". I animated the film in Maya and Adobe After Effects.
For more information on the USC Science Film Competition check out the link to the event: http://cinema.usc.edu/events/event.cfm?id=13234
