Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) computing is executed to demonstrate that
it is capable of solving a simple instance of the knapsack problem, wh
ich is known to be NP-complete. DNA molecules with different lengths c
oding the data are prepared, and the algorithm is implemented as molec
ular biological processes such as ligation,polymerase chain reaction (
PCR), and DNA sequencing. The scheme of encoding, experimental procedu
res and results are described, and the scalability of the present meth
od is discussed. Reactions between DNA molecules are expected to reali
ze a massively parallel computation of the order of 10(23) per mol.