PNA-enhanced DNA computing

Since Adleman's seminal paper, DNA computing is emerging as a very promising alternative to electronic computing. Its massive parallelism, its low energy needs, even its possible ability to break the NP barrier make its study irresistible. But for all its promise DNA computing has few results to show. This is because there are many biochemical problems in handling DNA that are still to be solved. Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) is a new class of informational biomolecule, a nucleic acid analogue with a backbone consisting of a peptide-like chain formed of glycine units to which the usual nucleobases are attached. PNA molecules have some properties, relevant to the area of computation with biomolecules, unique among nucleic acids: they hybridize to both complementary DNA and RNA with higher affinity that DNA itself, they can be used to enhance PCR amplification, and they can be used to restrict the action of restriction enzymes on DNA strands. The goal of this paper is to introduce PNA in the area of computation with biomolecules, and to discuss its possible role in overcoming some of the drawbacks that appear with DNA.