Training a molecular automaton to play a game
Research at the interface between chemistry and cybernetics has led to reports of ‘programmable molecules’, but what does it mean to say ‘we programmed a set of solution-phase molecules to do X’? A survey of recently implemented solution-phase circuitry 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ,...
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Published in | Nature nanotechnology Vol. 5; no. 11; pp. 773 - 777 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
Nature Publishing Group UK
01.11.2010
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Research at the interface between chemistry and cybernetics has led to reports of ‘programmable molecules’, but what does it mean to say ‘we programmed a set of solution-phase molecules to do X’? A survey of recently implemented solution-phase circuitry
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indicates that this statement could be replaced with ‘we pre-mixed a set of molecules to do X and functional subsets of X’. These hard-wired mixtures are then exposed to a set of molecular inputs, which can be interpreted as being keyed to human moves in a game, or as assertions of logical propositions. In nucleic acids-based systems, stemming from DNA computation
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, these inputs can be seen as generic oligonucleotides. Here, we report using reconfigurable
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nucleic acid catalyst-based units to build a multipurpose reprogrammable molecular automaton that goes beyond single-purpose ‘hard-wired’ molecular automata. The automaton covers all possible responses to two consecutive sets of four inputs (such as four first and four second moves for a generic set of trivial two-player two-move games). This is a model system for more general molecular field programmable gate array (FPGA)-like devices that can be programmed by example, which means that the operator need not have any knowledge of molecular computing methods.
Nucleic acid catalysts can be used to build a multipurpose molecular automaton that can be programmed by example. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1748-3387 1748-3395 |
DOI: | 10.1038/nnano.2010.194 |