Quantum and DNA computing

Question

Recently I came across the article Associative Quantum Memory. In the article, the authors discussed early physical implementation of quantum computers with NMR. In particular, NMR implementation used cytosine molecules as qubits. Since cytosine is one of four DNA bases, I got curious about whether there is a connection between quantum and DNA computing. Unfortunately, I was able to find only this article discussing the topic: DNA and Quantum Computing (published in 2000). In this last article, the possibility to implement a quantum computer in DNA molecules was discussed. Moreover, the author presented an idea to employ DNA as support for qubits (made from another material) and use the ability of DNA to react to chemical stimuli for the precise engineering of quantum computers at a molecular level.

However, from 2000 onwards, it seems that both computational paradigms have evolved independently. So, I am wondering if anybody knows about a (recent) paper discussing a combination of quantum and DNA computing.

Answer 1

The NMR quantum computing implementation you mentioned used cytosine as a 2-qubit platform because cytosine has two adjacent, carbon-bound hydrogen atoms with slightly different hyperfine couplings which can be used as qubits. From a quick skim of the article you shared, hybrid quantum/DNA computing was interesting to the authors because of the ability to use the properties of DNA to organize/arrange their qubits. Additionally, because every cytosine molecule is nearly identical, it's straightforward to have many identical qubits.

While not directly quantum/DNA computing, the successor of those ideas live in the developing field of molecular qubits. The main idea is that synthetic chemists can engineer molecules with desired qubit properties and then create many identical copies, which can be chemically combined to form multi-qubit structures. For some papers on the topic, you can check out publications from the group of Danna Freedman group at MIT: https://freedmanlab-mit.com/MIT/freedman/publications/index.html