Solving the 0–1 planning problem based on self-assembly of DNA tiles

DNA tile self-assembly has been proved to enable programmable manipulation of biological systems as a tool of molecular computation. It is mainly based on the property that is the spontaneous self-ordering of substructure into superstructure driven by annealing of Watson-Crick base-pairing DNA sequences. We take full advantage of the superiority of DNA tile self-assembly to construct a molecular computing system that implements a solution for the 0-1 planning problem. This algorithm can independently and simultaneously yield the data pool, containing all possible solutions when all basic operation tiles are designed beforehand. Then we can use some advanced bio-chemistry techniques to select the optimization solutions of the 0-1 planning problem. Our work has shown that it is possible to work with an exponential number of components to solve NP-complete problems. The method proposed here also can reduce the number of laboratory steps required for computation so that it can improve the computation speed.