Abstract
Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) excitable chemical medium exhibits a rich variety of spatial patterns of excitation. In a sub-excitable light-sensitive chemical medium, an asymmetric disturbing or excitation, causes formation of localized travelling excitation wave-fragments. When two or more wave-fragments collide, they annihilate or merge into new wave-fragment. The wave-fragments can be thought as elementary units of information and their interaction sites as a logical gates. Size and life span of a wave-fragment depends on a level of medium’s illumination. By encapsulating BZ reaction into a lipid vesicle, we can manipulate the BZ-derived logical gates. By interpreting wave-fragments as values of Boolean variables, we design a collision-based polymorphic logical gate in BZ vesicles. The gate implements operation xnor for low illumination, and it acts as nor gate for high illumination.
Acknowledgements
The work is part of the European project 248992 funded under 7th FWP (Seventh Framework Programme) FET Proactive 3: Bio-Chemistry-Based Information Technology CHEM-IT (ICT-2009.8.3). We thank the project coordinator Peter Dittrich and project partners Jerzy Gorecki and Klaus-Peter Zauner for their inspirations and useful discussions.