Biocompution: An emerging discipline at the intersection of the computational and biological sciences

Research at the intersection of the biological and computational sciences holds the potential to enable a number of important advances for both communities. Computational models of cell regulatory networks and biochemical signaling cascades are being constructed to elucidate the inner workings of living cells. Biologists are utilizing these models to explore the logical implication of alternative competing hypotheses, to design drugs that are highly selective for specific targets, and to control the behavior of cells in response to external inputs. Similarly, advances in the biological sciences are being used to drive innovation in the design of novel new computing architectures based on biomolecules. The inherent ability of DNA and RNA nucleotides to perform massively parallel computations is being exploited to solve difficult, NP-hard, computational problems. In addition. DNA molecules are being utilized to construct two- and three-dimensional physical nanostructures.