Recently, several experimental groups have demonstrated amplifiers synthesized from DNA strand displacement reactions. Motivated by these experiments, we study theoretically the problem of "exquisite detection": design a chemical reaction network for fast, cheap, and specific detection of a small number of molecules in a large volume. For us, the exquisite detection problem will form a test-bed for a proto-complexity theory of chemical circuits. We address the following questions: What chemical reaction networks does one permit as physically realizable? How does one compare the performance of different networks in a manner that is robust to differences in technology? What are the ultimate limits to the efficiencies of detectors, and how can we build better detectors? This is joint work with Nikhil Gopalkrishnan.
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