The computational premise
Construct a DNA molecule for each potential solution
- Generate candidate solutions in parallel
- Use molecular operations to eliminate invalid solutions
Five basic operations
- Extract: Separates 1 DNA tube into 2
- One with all molecules containing a particular substring
- Another with the remaining molecules
- Merge: Mixes two tubes
- Detect: Checks if there are any DNA strands in a tube
- Copy: Amplifies the strands in a tube
- Append: Attaches a string to the end of every molecule in a tube