Online Computer Terms Dictionary - D

DNA computing

<architecture> The use of DNA molecules to encode computational problems. Standard operations of molecular biology can then be used to solve some NP-hard search problems in parallel using a very large number of molecules. The exponential scaling of NP-hard problems still remains, so this method will require a huge amount of DNA to solve large problems.

[L. M. Adleman, "Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems", Science 266:1021-1024, 1994].

(1997-02-11)