reading of 1 nucleotide takes 1 hour on the fastest machines. You will need to read more than one nucleotide :-)
damnit, ok then make the bacterium that finds a solution not mark itself, but instead produce some huge molecule we can actually see using a microscope and encode the nonce into that somehow.
I think the fastest approaches are quite a bit faster than 1 nucleotide an hour.
http://www.helicosbio.com/Portals/0/Documents/Helicos%20tSMS%20Technology%20Primer.pdfDNA oligos are pretty good at picking out single sequences from a big mess of others. I'm not that familiar with the computation we are trying to do here, if someone could explain the search space we would need to look in, we could have a discussion on the feasibility of using DNA to find the needle in the haystack.
For example, if you are searching for a known sequence that can be encoded in 25 base pairs (50 bits) and either is, or is not present in a soup of random sequences bound to a glass surface, IN THEORY you could fluorescently tag a complementary oligo, wash it over the surface, wash unbound material off, and check for the presence of a fluorescent dot somewhere on the surface. IN THEORY. In practice, noise, dust, etc would make that approach difficult, but there may be work arounds.
