These Transistors Engineered With Bacteria Are Literally Alive, if a Little Slow
MIT researchers have developed biological transistors using bacteria to carry signals across circuits. While currently slow, this innovation aims to integrate computational control directly into biological systems.
Why it matters
This breakthrough could enable new forms of biotechnology where living organisms perform complex calculations for environmental or medical monitoring.
At its core, a lot of modern technology depends on relatively simple patterns to receive and relay information. Incidentally, living things have also functioned this way for billions of years—a comparison that hasn’t gone unnoticed by engineers.
In electrical circuits, transistors switch or amplify electric signals, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have swapped in electrical signals for biological ones, using three strains of the bacteria Pantoea agglomerans to “carry” signals across circuits. It takes the cells a lengthy eight hours to perform each calculation, but the findings , published this week in Nature Chemical Biology, demonstrate the potential of biotechnology in unexpected ways.
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