{"id":150326,"date":"2022-11-15T22:05:17","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T04:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/transforming-bacterial-cells-into-living-artificial-neural-circuits"},"modified":"2022-11-15T22:05:17","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T04:05:17","slug":"transforming-bacterial-cells-into-living-artificial-neural-circuits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/transforming-bacterial-cells-into-living-artificial-neural-circuits","title":{"rendered":"Transforming bacterial cells into living artificial neural circuits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/transforming-bacterial-cells-into-living-artificial-neural-circuits2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions\u2014 biocomputers of sorts.<\/p>\n<p>Graduate students and researchers from Technion\u2014Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel\u2019s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology &amp; Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic \u201cdevices\u201d designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/genetic+material\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">genetic material<\/a> was inserted into the bacterial cell in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria\u2019s \u201cnatural\u201d genome. Plasmids also exist in nature, and serve various functions. The research group designed the plasmid\u2019s genetic sequence to function as a simple computer, or more specifically, a simple artificial neural network. This was done by means of several genes on the plasmid regulating each other\u2019s activation and deactivation according to outside stimuli.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions\u2014 biocomputers of sorts. Graduate students and researchers from Technion\u2014Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel\u2019s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology &amp; Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,412,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}