A survey on DNA computing

The aim of this report is to make a review on DNA computing: molecular biology is used to suggest a new way of solving a NP-complete problem. The idea (due to Leonard Adleman in [Adl94]) is to use strands of DNA to encode the (instance of the) problem, and to manipulate them using techniques commonly available in any molecular biology laboratory, in order to simulate operations that select the solution of the problem, if it exists. After Adleman's paper (appeared on "Science" in November 1994), many authors have been interested in DNA computing. We will try to give a description of the discussions and the results which appeared in literature