Biocomputation: Moving Beyond Turing with Living Cellular Computers

It is a well-known story that theoretical computer science and biology have been drawing inspiration from each other for decades. While computer science has tried to mimic the functioning of living systems to develop computing models, including automata, artificial neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms, biology has used computing as a metaphor to explain the functioning of living systems.4 For example, biologists have used Boolean logic to conceptualize gene regulation since early 1970s, when Jacques Monod wrote the inspirational statement "… like the workings of computers."40 This article contends that information processing is the link between computer science and molecular biology. In computer science, a model of computation such as finite state machines or Turing machines defines how to generate output from a set of inputs and a set of rules or instructions.