DNA-based memories: A survey

DNA-based computers have been made possible by biotechnology developed in the last two decades. They can make advances on challenges caused by limiting features of conventional silicon computers. General and application specific DNA-based computers both require memory systems for DNA computers capable of either sophisticated processing capabilities or the storage of massive amounts of data and, more importantly, effective methods to extract information meaningful to human brains from massive corpora of data. We survey the challenges and methods to build such memories, as well as some applications where they offer very good potential. The DNA memories discussed here do not require an intelligent, outside brain to extract the relevant features from given data. Hybridization affinity naturally selects the relevant features in the input and display them on a DNA chip signature as a 2D graphical and semantic representation, by relatively simple parallel procedures that would take forbidding amounts of time to operate on equivalent massive amount of data in digital form by conventional computers. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg