Dirty Math: Turning Bacteria Into Lean Mean Computing Machines

The next time you wash your hands, you might want to think twice.  You may just be washing away a super computer!

Scientists at Missouri Western State University have developed a living computer composed of E. coli bacteria, programmed to solve quite complex mathematical problems.  As the Silicon age draws to it’s upper limits of capabilities, biologists and researchers are leaning their developments toward biological computers that have capabilities faster than anything old-fashioned Silicon can spit out.

In the first test, the bacteria was put up against what is known as the ‘Hamiltonian Path Problem’ which is surprisingly difficult to solve.  In this problem, the computer must discover and calculate every route of a car visiting 10 of the largest cities in the US and only passing through once.  This can have up to 3.5 million possible routes!  What is so astounding is that unlike todays computers of calculating or observing one route at a time, a bacteria based processor can evaluate multiple routes at one time.  If that isn’t amazing enough, since bacteria multiplies, thus the processing speed!

It’s common sense that you cannot just hook up your computer terminal to the pitri dish and start programming like a code monkey.  The scientists programmed the individual strands of DNA in the samples.  The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green.  The possible routes were explored by the random shuffling of DNA.  The correct answer was displayed by display both of the colors, hence yellow

This is just scratching the surface of what these amazing biological computers can do.  They will be applied to different types of problems including a more advanced version of the ‘path’ problem that includes many more cities.  Until then, please wash your hands.