The Thermodynamically Favoured Scaffolded DNA Computing (SDC) system, developed by DISCO team members Tristan Stérin, Abeer Eshra, Constantine Evans, Janet Adio and Damien Woods has now been published in Nature, with an accompanying Research Briefing!
This SDC system is a new way to compute with DNA molecules. The idea is simple enough: a long DNA strand acts as a supporting scaffold, and a collection of small DNA tile strands act as a program. The tile strands compete with each other to bind to the scaffold, and in doing so execute a computation.
The system is thermodynamically favoured, meaning that the intended output structure is designed to be the most favoured one of all. We can think of it as computing by rolling (energetically) downhill, or in physics/chemistry terms: relaxing to thermodynamic equilibrium. This is a bit different from classical silicon/molecular computation, as these cartoons illustrate (Fig 1 of the paper):
One amazing advantage over some previous approaches is that we can execute the computation by a simple anneal (heat it up! cool it down!), we don’t need precise temperature control at all, we don’t need to manually prepare special initial states (via gel purification or pre-forming complexes), and errors are naturally suppressed. The system is well suited to programming and program renewal (sequentially running the same test-tube with different inputs—just like on your laptop).
The work is a potentially new direction for DNA data storage, since any data stored on such a system would have natural in-built error correction properties.
