Imagine using living bacteria to answer mathematical questions or solve problems that a traditional computer would usually handle. It might sound like something out of a tacky sci-fi film, but it’s a reality that researchers are working on today. By engineering bacteria to perform computational tasks, scientists are developing new types of computers called ‘biocomputers’, which use living cells instead of traditional silicon chips. These biocomputers could one day solve problems in medicine, biotechnology, and environmental science in ways that conventional computers can’t.
In a recent study, researchers have demonstrated how genetically modified bacteria can be programmed to solve complex problems. These bacteria form a multicellular neural network, similar to the artificial neural networks (ANNs) used in computers for decision-making and problem-solving. By mixing and matching different strains of engineered bacteria, the team was able to build systems that could perform several different computational tasks, such as identifying prime numbers, determining whether a letter is a vowel, or even figuring out how many pieces of pizza you can get with a certain number of cuts.
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