Scientists Turn Bacteria Into Transistors to Build Living Circuit Boards
MIT researchers have engineered bacteria to function as biological transistors, creating a living circuit board capable of performing mathematical computations. By rearranging these bacterial colonies, the team can change the logic operations performed by the circuit.
Why it matters
This breakthrough in synthetic biology demonstrates the potential for using living organisms as programmable components in future computing architectures.
Credit: MIT News. Under fluorescent light, the device looks less like a computer than a tiny constellation of dots. The specks are actually bacteria glowing red and green across a slab of agar that can perform mathematical computations. One colony receives a chemical message. Another decides whether to let it pass. Others relay it down the line.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have engineered bacteria to perform the job of transistors, then arranged colonies of those bacteria into what amounts to a living circuit board. In the new Nature Chemical Biology study , the team used just five engineered strains to build circuits that could route information, add two binary inputs and perform a full-adder operation involving three inputs.
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