Tuesday, November 25, Volen 101, 2:10-3:10 p.m.
Biomolecular Computation (BMC) is an area of great potential due to the massive parallelism available at the molecular scale. A realistic assessment of the field must take into consideration its immaturity: there are as yet few practical demonstrations and uncertain applications beyond simply NP search problems. This talk surveys the results of BMC to date, and discusses the major challenges in the field, including the development of more realistic abstract models, software tools for simulation and design, new techniques to exploit the potential power of BMC, experimental demonstrations, and of useful applications. We discuss some recent research results: (1) A hierarchical series of models for BMC that are being used for software si mulations. (2) Techniques for BMC that use distributed massive parallelism to solve combinatorial explosive problems. (3) Nano-assembly techniques of polygons and lattices using recombinant DNA, and their use to assemble computational structures. These assembly techniques extend the power of BMC by taking advantage of local parallelism within a DNA molecules, and can be used to solve a wide variety of problems. (5) Biological applications of BMC such as the assembly of wet data bases directly from DNA in solution (without transformation to digital form via more traditional gen e sequencing techniques) and execution of computation tasks such as searching with in these wet data bases.
Host: Jim Storer