Efficiency and Reliability of Semantic Retrieval in DNA-Based Memories

Associative memories based on DNA-affinity have been proposed. Here, the efficiency, reliability, and semantic capability for associative retrieval of three models of a DNA-based memory are quantified and compared to current conventional methods. In affinity-based memories[1], retrievals and deletions under stringent conditions occur reliably (98%) within very short times (100 milliseconds), regardless of the degree of stringency of the recall or the number of simultaneous queries in the input. In a more sophisticated type of DNA-based memory B proposed and experimentally verified by Chen et al. [2] with three genomes, the sensitivity of the discrimination ability remains unchanged when used on a library of 18 plasmids in the range of 1-4kbps and does appear to grow exponentially with the number of library strands used, even under simultaneous multiple queries in the same input. Finally, using a new type of memory compaction mechanism for data mining in vitro, DNA-based semantic retrieval compares favorably with statistically-based Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), one of the best performers for semantic associative-based retrieval on text corpora. © Springer-Verlag 2004