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NAND Gate Built From Bacteria
thodelu writes "Scientists have taken another step towards biological computing, with the creation of logic gates from gut bacteria and DNA. While something similar has been done before, the team says its logic gates behave more like the standard electronic version. They're also modular, which means that they can be fitted together to make different types of logic gates, paving the way for more complex biological processors to be built in the future."
It would be a fitting platform for {choose your OS that you hate the most} now it can small like it performs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Since NAND gates can be combined to make AND, OR, and NOT gates, this means that bacteria could theoretically realize any logic circuit. Cool stuff.
Yeah but if you analyze reproduction, the 22 nm transistor and the 22 acre process plant must mate and share the work of raising the next generation of transistors and plants. I suppose the minimum size required for a complete industrial system (like a biosphere for industry) including raw material, power plants, warehouses, petrochemical facilities, is more like 22 square miles rather than 22 acres. So the average size of that "reproductive pair" is 22 miles for the big momma + 22 nm for the litte guy / 2 = about 11 miles. Pretty big.
On the other hand, a "reproductive pair" of 300 nm bacteria is pretty small, like 300 nm or so.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
E. coli is the best-studied bacterium. It's a lot more convenient to work with them.
If it's any consolation, students in past years at iGEM have figured out how to make it smell like mint or bananas with some genetic engineering, if you add the right chemical precursor to the plate. You can even silence the foul-smelling metabolic pathways (which are part of, but not all of, the awful smell of feces) if you're really determined to, but most of the time it's not worth it.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Devices could include sensors that swim inside arteries, detecting the build up of harmful plaque and delivering medications. Other sensors could perhaps detect and destroy cancer cells inside the body.
None of those functions would do very well in a symbiont. An organism tasked with repairing your tissue would have to be made out of your stem cells. An organism tasked with receiving signals from, or affecting, the nervous system would have to be capable of interacting with nerve endings. Unless you were thinking of manual endocrine signalling (releasing a hormone in response to a thought), which is inherently slow, and would still require a great deal of engineering the human side of things to produce the desired effect.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The primary application of this kind of biological computing tends to revolve around the negligible energy requirements: just throw some sugar water on it, and you're done for the next while; no electricity required. Other than that, there's a lot of theoretical interest in these systems for their comparability to neurons, but to be honest they're comparatively useless. We have great respect for DNA computing (which is very different from turning bacteria into transistors) and the potential of exploiting enzyme kinetics for computing applications, but projects like this are relatively fluffy and conceptual.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Knowing E. coli? Probably somewhere between a day and a week. Bacterial DNA replication is really lousy. Anything that doesn't contribute to keeping the cell alive tends to get a little messed up when it's allowed to reproduce freely.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
However, this NAND gate comes with a suite of chemical sensors attached. Many of which can be used as inputs to the gate. I doubt that can be fabricated in a 300nm circle.