Can Bacteria Compute?

March 20, 2006--Living things know a lot. There is a lot of information encoded in the DNA in every cell of every living creature, and all the creatures in an ecosystem interacting make the information more complex and subtle.

How could scientists tap the information contained in a population and use it as a living computer? They build structures to breed the common bacterium E. coli and watch as it populates and moves to better, and away from worse, environments.

Biologist Juan Keymer, of Princeton University, in New Jersey, likes to call these structures nano-urban-biology. And the structures, rooms about as wide and long as the thickness of a human hair (100 millionths of a meter) and about a third that tall, resemble crowded apartments or office buildings for the bacteria. And the "rooms" are connected by thin gates, like streets, that the bacteria can travel through to look for a better environment (see image).

As they move to better living conditions, the bacteria reproduce (see video; AVI file, 9.59 Mbytes). And with every new generation, mutations happen, and the population changes a little bit. By stacking each room with different challenges, such as strong UV light, Keymer and his colleagues aim to generate selective forces that could help them design microorganisms.

Contact:

Juan Keymer
Princeton University
Tel: 609-258-4353
keymer@Princeton.edu

Martha Heil
American Institute of Physics
Tel: 301-209-3088
mheil@aip.org