[phendrenad2]

This is totally indecipherable to someone who doesn't know the first thing about DNA. However I have some questions:

1) Is DNA "computation" turing-complete?

2) Can DNA make the basic digital logic gates, AND, NOT, NOR, etc.?

If neither of those are true, then this is an incredibly silly article and I'm really impressed.

[pallada92]

1) The answer is both yes and no. Any particular digital circuit can be implemented, but not universal Turing machine, simply because there is no way to deal with arrays.

There is mind-blowing paper, that gives exhaustive anwser to this question: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01519828/document

This paper is about chemical reaction networks, but in 2010 it was shown, that any chemical reaction network is realizable in DNA: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/12/5393.full.pdf

2) Yes, it was figured out in 2006, how to do logic gates in DNA: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5805/1585

[jacquesm]

> simply because there is no way to deal with arrays.

I wouldn't be so quick to make that call. That we don't know how to do it does not mean it can't be done and there is some weak evidence (innate knowledge) that nature has indeed found a way to do this, just that we don't understand it.

[swiley]

This is exactly the feeling I got when reading (Adelman's?) paper on finding Euler paths in graphs using DNA.

I still feel this way although after a lot of googling it's a little better, I wish I had a good book or other resource on it.

[TheCoreh]

Reading a machine translated version of the Russian article linked from GitHub (that seems far more complete) the author mentions RNA can behave like NOR gates, so all other gates must be possible as well

[dekhn]

yes, DNA is turing complete. all of the basic circuits can be implemented.Unfortunately, practically speaking it's hard to scale these up to be "useful" (competitive with modern CPUs or hard drives).