BIOLOGICAL COMPUTERS

Bio-engineers at Stanford University developed the first biological transistor. This transistor is made of genetic material: DNA and RNA. This biological transistor is a final step required to build biological computers that can operate inside living cells. We are now so close to biological computers that operate inside living cells and can detect changes in a cell's environment, store and record changes in cell and cell environment in memory made of DNA.

Stanford's transcriptor is essentially the biological analog of the digital transistor. The main difference is that transistors control the flow of electricity while transcriptor control the flow of RNA polymerase as it travels along a strand of DNA. The question is how the transcriptors do this? The trasncriptors control the flow of RNA using special combination of enzymes that control RNA's movement along the strand of DNA. According to the Jerome Bonnet who worked on this project for trascriptors to control RNA is very important the choice of enzymes. So they have spent countless ours carefully selecting the enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals so that bio-computers can bioengineered within a variety of organisms. 

Transistor enables a small current change to turn into a larger one. So one of the key functions of transistor is amplification. The same key function can be applied to the transcriptor. A tiny change in the enzyme's activity can cause a very large change in the two connected genes. By combining multiple transcriptors, the Stanford researchers have created a Boolean Integrase Logic or shortly called BIL gates. This gates are the biological equivalent of AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR and XNOR logic gates. So with this BIL gates a biological computer could perform computation inside living cell. But of course there is a problem with a storage data and some way to connect all of the transcriptors and memory together.

This isn’t to say that highly functional biological computers will arrive in short order, but we should certainly begin to see simple biological sensors that measure and record changes in a cell’s environment. Stanford has contributed the BIL gate design to the public domain, which should allow other research institutes, such as Harvard’s Wyss Institute, to also begin work on the first biological computer.

Moving forward, though, the potential for real biological computers is immense. We are essentially talking about fully-functional computers that can sense their surroundings, and then manipulate their host cells into doing just about anything. Biological computers might be used as an early-warning system for disease, or simply as a diagnostic tool (has the patient consumed excess amounts of sugar, even after the doctor told them not to?) Biological computers could tell their host cells to stop producing insulin, to pump out more adrenaline, to reproduce some healthy cells to combat disease, or to stop reproducing if cancer is detected. Biological computers will probably obviate the use of many pharmaceutical drugs.