Martyn Amos - Böcker

The completion of the first draft of the human genome has led to an explosion of interest in genetics and molecular biology. The view of the genome as a network of interacting computational components is well-established, but researchers are now trying to reverse the analogy, by using living organisms to construct logic circuits. The potential applications for such technologies is huge, ranging from bio-sensors, through industrial applications to drug delivery and diagnostics. This book would be the first to deal with the implementation of this technology, describing several working experimental demonstrations using cells as components of logic circuits, building toward computers incorporating biological components in their functioning.

The completion of the first draft of the human genome has led to an explosion of interest in genetics and molecular biology. The view of the genome as a network of interacting computational components is well-established, but researchers are now trying to reverse the analogy, by using living organisms to construct logic circuits. The potential applications for such technologies is huge, ranging from bio-sensors, through industrial applications to drug delivery and diagnostics. This book would be the first to deal with the implementation of this technology, describing several working experimental demonstrations using cells as components of logic circuits, building toward computers incorporating biological components in their functioning.

The book is useful for graduate students, researchers in the field, and the general scientific reader who is interested in inherently interdisciplinary research at the intersections of computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, UCNC 2016, held in Manchester, UK, in July 2016. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions.

The book is useful for graduate students, researchers in the field, and the general scientific reader who is interested in inherently interdisciplinary research at the intersections of computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics.

DNA computation has emerged in the last ten years as an exciting new - search ?eld at the intersection (and, some would say, frontiers) of computer science,biology,engineering,andmathematics.AlthoughanticipatedbyFe- man as long ago as the 1950s [59], the notion of performing computations at a molecular level was only realized in 1994, with Adleman’s seminal work [3] on computing with DNA. Since then the ?eld has blossomed rapidly, with signi?cant theoretical and experimental results being reported regularly. Several books [120, 39] have described various aspects of DNA compu- tion, but this is, to the author’s best knowledge, the ?rst to bring together descriptions of both theoreticaland experimentalresults.The targetaudience is intentionally broad, including students as well as experienced researchers. We expect that users of the book will have some background in either c- puter science, mathematics, engineering, or the life sciences. The intention is that this book be used as a tutorial guide for newcomers to the ?eld as well as a reference text for people already working in this fascinating area. To this end, we include two self-contained tutorial chapters (1 and 2), which convey only those aspects of computer science and biology that are required to understand the subsequent material.