Hardware Emulation of DNA Chips

A. Delgado (Colombia)

Keywords

Associative memory, DNA chip, parallel processing,robotics, rule base.

Abstract

DNA chips are currently used to study the gene expression of normal versus abnormal cells or tissues. This technology has allowed the classification of tumors and probably, in the future, the prescription of optimal treatments for every condition. 2. DNA When interacting with proteins and other molecules, DNA directs the development of a living entity. DNA is a chain of building blocks called nucleotides, each nucleotide has a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four bases {A, C, G, T}. The bases bind naturally or complement each other in the Watson Crick sense, A and T with two hydrogen bonds, C and G with three hydrogen bonds [1]. From the engineering point of view, DNA chips can be considered as associative memories that can be emulated using parallel hardware such as FPGAs or FPAAs. In this paper we propose a rule base that can be evaluated using the DNA chip principle, then a digital circuit is implemented in VHDL to control a mobile robot. For illustration purposes, the double stranded DNA molecule (dsDNA) or DNA helix can be compared with a ladder. The two uprights are the sugar phosphate backbones, and the rungs are the pair of bases, see figure 1.

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