Research

A DNA Computing Model for the Graph Vertex Coloring Problem Based on a Probe Graph

  • Jin Xu , 1 ,
  • Xiaoli Qiang 2 ,
  • Kai Zhang 3 ,
  • Cheng Zhang 1 ,
  • Jing Yang 4
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  • 1. Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies of Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2. Institute of Novel Computer Science and Intelligent Software, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China
  • 3. School of Computer Science, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430081, China
  • 4. School of Control and Computer Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China

Received date: 10 Dec 2017

Accepted date: 07 Jan 2018

Published date: 26 Feb 2018

Copyright

2018 2018 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier LTD on behalf of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Higher Education Press Limited Company. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Abstract

The biggest bottleneck in DNA computing is exponential explosion, in which the DNA molecules used as data in information processing grow exponentially with an increase of problem size. To overcome this bottleneck and improve the processing speed, we propose a DNA computing model to solve the graph vertex coloring problem. The main points of the model are as follows:①The exponential explosion problem is solved by dividing subgraphs, reducing the vertex colors without losing the solutions, and ordering the vertices in subgraphs; and②the bio-operation times are reduced considerably by a designed parallel polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology that dramatically improves the processing speed. In this article, a 3-colorable graph with 61 vertices is used to illustrate the capability of the DNA computing model. The experiment showed that not only are all the solutions of the graph found, but also more than 99% of false solutions are deleted when the initial solution space is constructed. The powerful computational capability of the model was based on specific reactions among the large number of nanoscale oligonucleotide strands. All these tiny strands are operated by DNA self-assembly and parallel PCR. After thousands of accurate PCR operations, the solutions were found by recognizing, splicing, and assembling. We also prove that the searching capability of this model is up to O(359). By means of an exhaustive search, it would take more than 896 000 years for an electronic computer (5 1014 s1) to achieve this enormous task. This searching capability is the largest among both the electronic and non-electronic computers that have been developed since the DNA computing model was proposed by Adleman’s research group in 2002 (with a searching capability of O(220)).

Cite this article

Jin Xu , Xiaoli Qiang , Kai Zhang , Cheng Zhang , Jing Yang . A DNA Computing Model for the Graph Vertex Coloring Problem Based on a Probe Graph[J]. Engineering, 2018 , 4(1) : 61 -77 . DOI: 10.1016/j.eng.2018.02.011

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