From the November 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 4 comments

Smart DNA: Programming the Molecule of Life for Work and Play ( Preview )

Logic gates made of DNA could one day operate in your bloodstream, collectively making medical decisions and taking action. For now, they play a mean game of in vitro tic-tac-toe

By Joanne Macdonald, Darko Stefanovic and Milan N. Stojanovic

Second, electronic gates have a threshold voltage at which their switching happens, and their outputs are tied to specific voltages so that they cannot linger at an intermediate voltage. Thus, the 0s and 1s are well defined, and the logic is truly digital. Solutions of our gates, in contrast, change in continuous fashion between the inactive and the fully active forms depending on how many inputs we add to the fluid. This behavior would be important if we were attempting to build the molecular equivalent of a personal computer, but it does not matter for many biomedical applications.

DNA Plays Tic-Tac-Toe

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