MIT researchers have engineered bacteria to behave like transistors, making it possible to build living “circuit boards” that can be printed onto growth material in a Petri dish.
In conventional electronics, transistors act as switches that control whether electrical current flows. In the biological system developed at MIT, engineered bacteria perform a similar role by regulating the movement of small signaling molecules that carry information to other parts of the circuit.
The team created two types of bacterial transistors and three additional bacterial strains that act as relays between them. Together, those five strains provide a flexible toolkit that can be arranged into many different circuit designs. In their new study, the researchers used the system to build circuits capable of combining two or three inputs, as well as directing an incoming signal to a selected destination within the circuit.
“We’ve built some initial computer architecture components that are commonly used, but any operation can be built with these five strains,” says Hamid Doosthosseini PhD ’25, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the new study.
To read more, click here.