Credit: Pixabay/CC0 public domainOne molecule can contain a lot of information. This information includes the number of each type of constituent atom as well as how they are arranged and attach to one another. This information is used to determine the outcome of chemical reactions and transforms it. When molecules collide, they break down, reassemble and rebuild in predictable ways.Juan-Prez Mercader is a Santa Fe Institute External Professor and a physicist/astrobiologist based in Harvard University. It is a type of computation. A computing device takes information as an input and then mechanically transforms it into something that serves a purpose. You can input anything you want: Numbers, letters and objects. Images, symbols and other things are all possible.Or, says Prez-Mercader, molecules. Reacting molecules follows the same steps as computation. Input, transformation and output. Prez-Mercader says that "it's a computation which controls when certain events occur," but at the nanometer or smaller scale.Although molecular structures may seem small, their potential for computation is immense. He says that this is a powerful computing tool that must be harnessed. Noting that each mole of a substance contains 1023 elementary chemical processing units capable of computation, he adds that it's possible to compute with these moles. Prez-Mercader developed a new field called "native chemical computation" over the past few years. It's a multifaceted endeavor: Prez-Mercader wants to exploit chemical computing and also identify the best-suited challenges."What kinds of problems could we solve if we have such great power?" He asks. He says they are not the same as supercomputer-solved problems. "So, what are they good at?"He has many ideas. He says chemical reactions are excellent at building things. His group "programmed" chemical reaction to use a variety of molecules to build a container in 2017. These molecules could in a sense recognize information and transform it in a particular way, similar to computation.Prez-Mercader, along with his main collaborator, Marta Dueas -Dez, a chemical engineer at Harvard and the Repsol Technology Lab, Madrid, published a recent review of their progress in chemical computation. They describe in it how chemical reactions can be used in a laboratory to create a variety of familiar computing systems. These include simple logic gates and Turing Machines. Prez-Mercader says that if chemical reactions are "programmable" like other types, then they could be used for many applications, such as intelligent drug delivery, neural networks or artificial cells.Continue reading Researcher creates a chemical system that mimics the early behavior of cellsMore information: Marta Dueas-Dez et al, Native Chemical Computation. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction is an example of a generic application of oscillating chemistry. Frontiers in Chemistry (2021). Marta Dueas-Dez et al, Native Chemical Computation. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction is illustrated with a generic application of oscillating chemistry. A Review, (2021). DOI: 10.3389/fchem.2021.611120
