Performance Limits on Biochemical Computation

In 1997 Magnasco [6] offered a proof that chemical kinetics is Turing universal. Magnasco treats chemistry as abstract: He chooses an abstract set of reactions and rate constants and then assumes a set of chemical species can be found to meet those specifications. It is the primary contribution of this work to demonstrate that at least for biopolymers, this assumption is unfounded, and that any single-vessel chemical reaction system based on biopolymers has bounded computational capability. Approach: The approach combines results from the areas of chemical physics, information theory, transport phenom-