First living computer used for flipping pancakes

May 20, 2008 US researchers have genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing a classic mathematical puzzle. Molecules of DNA have the natural ability to store and process information, in fact DNA represents the highest storage density of anything on Earth - French cytogeneticist Jerome LeJeune showed that the amount of information in one strand of human DNA is the same as that in 1,000 books of small print, each around 500 pages thick. Scientists have been performing computations with bare DNA molecules in lab dishes since the mid-1990s, but the new research, reported online in the Journal of Biological Engineering, is the first to do DNA computation in living cells.

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