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The Future of Computing
Synthetic Biology as a Solution
When I think of the future of computing, my thoughts go to new hardware, optimization, or quantum computing. MIT Technology put an interesting article out today that points to an area we often don’t consider: synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology aims to design cells to function in desirable ways. It’s common to use synthetic biology to build new sensors, and some applications are in wearables. A recent paper showed one could program bacteria to perform a computer-like task in a distributed manner.
The authors designed the solution such that multiple cells work in parallel with different functions. Their toy problem is solving a maze:
Bagh and his colleagues mathematically translated this problem into a truth table composed of 1s and 0s, showing all possible maze configurations. Then they mapped those configurations onto 16 different concoctions of four chemicals. The presence or absence of each chemical corresponds to whether a particular square is open or blocked in the maze.
The cell populations generated solutions to the maze by expressing four different fluorescent proteins. The experiment summarized that there were three possible “solutions” to the small labyrinth (and 13 non-solutions).
These experiments serve as a proof of concept for the future of more complex problems that can utilize distributed computing among bacterial cells. If scalable, this could be useful in finding solutions for disease and agriculture (which synthetic biology has already been beneficial).
