Bacteria Computer

Other Unique Engineering Ideas
Scientists may have made the first step of advances for the next generation of super computers! Advancements in technology have allowed scientists to breed a computer out of of thousands of E. Coli bacteria.Computer logic usually consists of electronic switches, but recently scientists have been exploring alternative means for conducting calculations. “Imagine having the parallel processing power of a million computers all in the space of a drop of water,” says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina. “It’s possible to do that because cells are so tiny and DNA is so tiny.”

1. Description

2. Why: Burnt Pancakes

3. How

4. Future Trends

5. Related Links

Useful links: organic computer, computer, EColi, pancake problem, PancakeProblem

Description

A research team from the biology and the mathematics departments of Davidson College, North Carolina and Missouri Western State University, Missouri, USA added genes to Escherichia coli bacteria, creating bacterial computers able to solve classic mathematical puzzles. They have successfully developed a computer out of E. coli bacteria which has managed to solve some complex mathematical problems for instance the burnt pancake problem-- at least in a limited form.The E. coli computer differs from a regular computer in that it turn each piece of DNA into a simulated pancake, with sections of DNA being flipped to hide from a killer antibiotic if they get the answer right, and killed if they get the answer wrong.

Why: Burnt Pancakes

The Burnt Pancake Problem works like this: Imagine you are a diner owner. To promote your delicious fare, you want to create a golden pyramid of pancakes. Using a spatula, you have to rearrange an existing stack of different-sized pancakes, each of which is burned on one side. The aim is to sort the stack so the largest pancake is on the bottom and all pancakes are golden side up.

  • The problem involves creating a golden-side-up stack of pancakes out of all different size pancakes,

  • Each of which is burned one side, with the largest pancake on the bottom tapering up to the smallest on top.

  • You can only use a spatula to flip a top section of pancakes,

  • The math problem is to sort the stack in as few flips as possible.

  • For six pancakes, there are 46,080 possible solutions.

  • For 12 pancakes, there are 1.9 trillion permutations.

A traditional, silica-based computer would run through every single possible solution to the problem, one at a time. Since a million bacteria-based computers can fit into a single drop of water, all of them working together could speed up the calculations dramatically.

How

The problem by itself is a metaphor for an important problem in computer science — sorting large amounts of data into the right order by repeatedly flipping chunks of data. Knowing the minimum number of flips necessary will tell programmers when their software has been fully optimized to sort the data as quickly as possible. At time the problems get so immense that even having a huge network of computers is not enough.When salmonella invades a body, the person’s immune system learns to recognize a certain protein on the bacterium’s surface. By flipping a segment of its DNA — which involves snipping out a length of the string like molecule, turning that snippet around and reattaching it backward — salmonella can switch to a different version of this protein that the person’s immune system doesn’t recognize, thus evading attack. Haynes and her colleagues inserted this enzyme, called Hin recombinase, into E. coli.

  • The number of bacteria in a colony grows exponentially

  • A single bacterium engineered to perform the flipping problem in its DNA will soon become several billion or trillion little bacterial computers.

  • Each bacterium in the colony can then compute a separate flipping scenario.

  • The flipping is done by an enzyme taken from the salmonella bacterium.

  • The enzyme could then flip segments of E. coli’s DNA that are marked by genetic flags.

  • The researchers designed these segments so that, when lined up in the correct order like pancakes stacked from biggest to smallest (burned side down, of course), the DNA spells out the code for a gene that gives the bacterium resistance to an antibiotic.

  • That way, applying the antibiotic to the colony of engineered bacteria killed all of the bacteria that had not yet solved the puzzle.

  • Only those that had “stacked their pancakes” would survive.

  • Measuring how long it took the bacteria to reach the solution indicated how many flips were required.

Future Trends

What's new about this latest effort is that the bacteria are made to communicate, so that millions or even billions of them gather in a predictable manner.While the potential computational power of programmed bacteria is immense, the DNA-computation system that Haynes and her colleagues designed can only solve problems by flipping and sorting data. It doesn’t have the open-ended computing flexibility of a laptop computer or even a solar-powered calculator, so the bacteria can only handle a limited set of mathematical problemsWith millions of "computers" able to fit in a drop of water, scaling won't be an issue once they figure things out, but for now E. coli can only figure out how to sort two pancakes.

Keywords

Computer, E.Coli, DNA computation, Burnt Pancake Problem

Related Articles

Related Links