Arithmetic and Logic Operations with DNA

The use of DNA molecules to solve hard computational problems has been demonstrated in recent studies. However, the question of suitability of DNA for solving simple computer operations, such as boolean or arithmetic operations, has largely been unaddressed. Incorporation of these operations in DNA computing is essential for solving a wide range of applications. We present a fixed bit encoding scheme, modeling the input/output mechanisms of an electronic computer, and show how a sequence of such operations can be executed in a single test tube producing a unique result. In recent work, Adleman [1] and Lipton [2] presented the idea of solving difficult combinatorial search problems using DNA molecules. These studies showed that DNA computing may have an advantage over electronic computers for such problem domains due to the massive parallelism inherent in DNA reactions. However, for DNA computing to be applicable on a wider range of problems, support for simple computational operation..