Biology is complex. The cell or the organism has to respond to a wide variety of external stimuli and respond. The stimuli aggregation and response obviously happen at the brain and neuron level but also at the cellular level.
Dr Drew Andy of Standford University has created biological transistors based upon biological transcription that happens at the cellular level. He has created switches that would respond to the stimuli that is received. Combining the switches in different formats with different response elements makes the biological system behave as an AND gate, OR gate or NOR gate. These are the basis of computation.
The switches and the science behind them is not novel. The switches were first discovered in E.coli with the lac operon that was characterized in the 70-80’s. The operon as it was called was the response element that responded to the presence of lactose and controlled the enzymes of lactose metabolism that are synthesized. A cell typically performs this function normally but what Dr Andy has done is to combine these elements into an interesting mix that enables combining different elements such that the response of the cell can be used as a sum of operations.
Will this make a biological computer? Probably not. It is too slow and there are many biological molecules required but what this can enable is the ability to compute at the cellular level that can be programmed by the molecular biologist. It will takes weeks to program and probably require days to read out but ultimately could be a good model for biological computation.
The video explains the science very well and all the materials from this study have been made publicly available through Biobrick public agreement.
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