Soundness and quality of semantic retrieval in DNA-based memories with abiotic data

Associative memories based on DNA-affinity have been proposed based in L. M. Adleman (1994) and E. Baum (1995). Previously, we have quantified the quality of retrieval of genomic information in simulation as stated in M. Garzon et al. (2003). Here, the ability of two types of DNA-based memories to store abiotic data and retrieve semantic information is evaluated for soundness and compared to state-of-the-art symbolic methods available, such as LSA (latent semantic analysis) of T. K. Landauer et al. Their ability is poor when performed without a proper compaction procedure. However, when the corpus is summarized through a selection protocol based on PCR or a training procedure on J. Chen et al. (2004) to extract useful information, their performance is much closer to that of LSA, according to human expert ratings. These results are expected to improve and scale up when actual DNA molecules are employed in real test tubes, currently a feasible goal.