As fundamental technological limits are beginning to limit the progress of traditional silicon-based computers, biology offers exciting possibilities for building the next generation of computers using the molecular machinery of life to perform computations. While scientists have demonstrated that DNA and cellular processes can be leveraged to perform computations, all experiments to date have been done by hand at a laboratory bench. For biological computing to come into the mainstream, there needs to be a standalone device that can automatically execute the biological protocols and provide a traditional interface to computer programmers and end users.
In this research, an inter-disciplinary team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University will collaborate to produce the first programmable chip that can support biological computing. The chip will rely on microfluidics: a technology for manipulating picoliter-quantities of fluids throughout the stages of a biological protocol. In addition to advancing the state-of-the-art in automated fluid transport and manipulation, this "lab-on-a-chip" system will include a new programming language and software system to allow everyday programmers to easily utilize the device. As a demonstration, the microfluidic chip will be applied in a novel study on the response of mammalian cells to complex input signals.
Beyond biological computing, a self-contained lab-on-a-chip system can have many ground-breaking applications such as multi-purpose home diagnostic machines and fast drug discovery using automated protocols. The Primary Investigators in this research are Prof. Saman Amarasinghe (MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), Prof. Todd Thorsen (MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering), and Prof. Jeremy Gunawardena (Department of Systems Biology, Harvard University).
