Foundational Aspects of Biomolecular Information and Computation

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In the same way we use the letters of the alphabet to write text, and the bits 0 and 1 to write computer machine code, the four basic DNA units (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine) are used by Nature to write genetic information as DNA strands. The possibility of encoding symbolic information on DNA, and the fact that biochemical processes such as cut-and-paste of DNA strands have been proved to be able to perform arithmetic and logic operations, led to the development of the field of DNA computing. The primary goal of my research is to analyze this new way of storing and manipulating data on DNA strands, as bioinformation and biocomputation are fundamentally different from their electronic counterparts in several aspects. Most importantly, DNA-encoded information is not associated with a memory location but consists of infinitesimal free-floating DNA strands that interact with each other due to their Watson-Crick complementarity.