An autonomous molecular computer for logical control of gene expression.pdfVIP

letters to nature .............................................................. programmed the computer to identify and analyse mRNA of An autonomous molecular computer disease-related genes18–22 associated with models of small-cell lung cancer and prostate cancer, and to produce a single-stranded for logical control of gene expression DNA molecule modelled after an anticancer drug. Taking our cue from the terminology of medical treatment, we 1,2 2 1 2 consider that our molecular computer performs in vitro a compu- Yaakov Benenson , Binyamin Gil , Uri Ben-Dor , Rivka Adar 23,24 Ehud Shapiro 1,2 tational version of ‘diagnosis’—the identi?cation of a combi- nation of mRNA molecules at speci?c levels, which in our example 1Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and 2Department of is a highly simpli?ed model of cancer—and ‘therapy’—production Biological Chemistry, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel of a biologically active molecule, which in our case is a drug-like ............................................................................................................................................................................. single-stranded ss DNA with known anticancer activity Fig. 1a . Early biomolecular computer research focused on laboratory- The computer operation is governed by a ‘diagnostic rule’ that scale, human-operated computers for complex computational encodes medical knowledge in simpli?ed form Fig. 1b . The left- problems1–7. Recently, simple molecular-scale autonomous pro- hand side of the rule consists of a list of molecular indicators for a grammable computers were demonstrated8–15 allowing both speci?c disease, and its right-hand side indicates a molecule to be input and output information to be in molecular form. Such released, which could be a drug for that disease. For example, the computers, using biological molecules as