Introduction to deoxyribonucleic acid structure, bio-molecular operators and DNA computing

• Main Author: Ibrahim, Zuwairie
• Format: Book Section
• Published: Penerbit UTM 2008
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/22904/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

In this chapter, the basic structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is presented and described starting from nucleotides, which is the monomer of the DNA, to the famous helical structure of the DNA. In order to understand how to make DNA performs the computation, it is required to study several biochemical reactions such as DNA hybridization and denaturation, ligation, polymerization, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and magnetic bead separation. Hence, these biomolecular operators, which are often employed for DNA manipulation in DNA computing, are also presented. Next, a novel in vitro approach, which has been proposed by Adleman for solving Hamiltonian Path Problem (HPP), is presented and some implementation issues of Adleman DNA computer are discussed.