Chemical
Systems using chemical substrates
Systems using Chemical
Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction computer
boolean logic / reaction-diffusion computation (via chemical wave collisions)
The BZ reaction is an oscillating chemical system that produces propagating excitation waves in a thin layer of reagent (typically ferroin or ruthenium catalyst in acidified bromate/malonate). Signals...
DNA strand-displacement computer
boolean logic / neural network inference (via hybridization cascades)
Single-stranded DNA molecules in solution compute via toehold-mediated strand displacement: a short single-stranded 'toehold' on a partially double-stranded gate complex allows an input strand to inva...
Repressilator (synthetic gene oscillator)
limit-cycle oscillation / biological clock (via negative-feedback transcription loop)
Elowitz & Leibler (2000, Nature) constructed a synthetic oscillator in E. coli from three mutual repressor genes wired in a ring: LacI represses tetR; TetR represses cI; CI represses lacI. No gene pro...