"An E. coli biocomputer solves a maze by sharing the work"

https://www.technologyreview.com/202...g-biocomputer/

Quote:

E. coli thrives in our guts, sometimes to unfortunate effect, and it facilitates scientific advances—in DNA, biofuels, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine, to name but a few. Now this multitalented bacterium has a new trick: it can solve a classic computational maze problem using distributed computing—dividing up the necessary calculations among different types of genetically engineered cells. This neat feat is a credit to synthetic biology, which aims to rig up biological circuitry much like electronic circuitry and to program cells as easily as computers.

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The particular issue here is that the distributed model is solving the problem that they were coming up against where the limits of what could be put into a single cell were being reached:

Quote:

Chris Voigt, a synthetic biologist at MIT (and editor in chief of ACS Synthetic Biology, which published Bagh’s result), believes distributed computing is the direction that synthetic biology needs to go. In Voigt’s view, grand ambitions for microbial cells are justified—and he’s run calculations to back that up. “One teaspoon of bacteria has more logic gates in it than, I think, 2 billion Xeon processors,” he says. “And it has more memory in the DNA than the entire internet. Biology has incredible computing capacity, and it does it by distributing it over an enormous number of cells.” But there are caveats: “A gate takes 20 minutes to process, so it’s very slow.” Last year, Voigt and collaborators succeeded in programming DNA with a calculator’s algorithm and generating a digital display with fluorescing E. coli. They used software created by Voigt’s lab, called Cello. Cello takes files from Verilog—a programming language used to describe and model circuits—and converts them into DNA, so the same sorts of configurations can be run in cells. All the circuitry for the E. coli calculator, however, was crammed into a single type of cell, a single colony. “We’ve kind of hit the limitation on that,” he admits. “We need to figure out how to make larger designs.”

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