Welcome to the MPP!
Underneath the computer revolution that has changed our lives are the fundamental principles of computer science---they have allowed us to master electronic systems with billions of components and software with millions of lines of code to do amazingly complex tasks.
In the Molecular Programming Project (MPP) at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington, we will develop new computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity.
The biomolecular programs of life give inspiration that this is possible, from the low-level operating system controlling cell metabolism, to the high-level code for development, the process by which a single cell becomes an entire organism. The team aims to create analogous molecular programs using non-living chemistry, in which computing and decision-making will carried out by chemical processes themselves. Through the creation of molecular programming languages, theory for analyzing them, and experiments for validating them, our long-term vision is to establish "molecular programming" as a subdiscipline of computer science---one that will enable a yet-to-be imagined array of applications from chemical circuitry for interacting with biological molecules to molecular robotics and nanoscale computing.
|
