Engineers Invent Programming Language To Build Synthetic DNA 51
vinces99 writes "Chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to 'program' how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell. A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as smart drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level."
exception handling (Score:5, Interesting)
Biological systems have many broken legacy "routines" that don't get called, or get called, and execute incorrectly. How do these engineers intend to deal with exception handling in this capacity?
For instance, a well known mutation known as bombay phenotype involved a precursor protein called "H protein", which then gets modified by additional cellular processes to become either A or B blood antigen. The mutation makes a defective H protein, and thus prevents the proper activation of the A or B antigen "routine".
If they try to build a programing language for cellular processes involving DNA and protein synthesis, then how will they handle exception cases, such as that one? It can be likened to the halting problem, because the question asked is "given these inputs and this program, will the program ever halt?"
How do they intend to resolve this problem?