Scientists brought us one step closer to a living computer.

Sounds like something straight out of science fiction. Scientists believe they will soon be able to create circuits capable of calculating from bacteria. What they have learned about the bacteria can help us understand the origins of the human brain.

In a new study of Süel Laboratory, University of California-San Diegoresearchers They have discovered that bacteria possess working memory. Working memory refers to the ability to retain the information we need to perform a task while doing it. It is a basic short-term memory unit that we build on solutions.

How does this apply to bacteria? Even working memory sounds complex to a single-celled organism. But everything changes when that bacteria joins a group of other bacteria in a biofilm. A biofilm occurs when bacteria, which can coexist rather than compete, colonize a surface together. They produce a viscous extracellular matrix that makes them stick to each other and to the surface.

Biofilms are everywhere. Consider the plaque on our teeth. Dental plaque is a highly effective biofilm of various bacteria that work together to adhere to tooth enamel. The sticky slime keeps bacteria in an ideal location to extract nutrients from our meals while we chew.

Biofilms and memory.

What made these scientists think they could find a form of memory in living slime? It started when the same researchers discovered that bacteria use ion channels to communicate with each other. That’s the kind of finding that biologists are excited about, because that’s how neurons communicate. Axons in brain cells carry information to other cells by carrying out an electrical charge, which is transmitted through ion channels.

If bacteria use ion channels, could they look like brain cells in other ways, too? When more new research suggested that bacteria could store information about their past states, the researchers wanted to know more.

The laboratory team exposed the biofilms of the bacterial species Bacillus subtilis to light. The light induced changes in the bacterial’s membrane potential, changing its electrical charge. This formed an optical impression and allowed the laboratory to use light stimuli to encode patterns. The optical prints lasted for hours, forming a kind of working memory.

Later, when the researchers stimulated the cells again with light, the biofilm responded with the coded pattern. Similar to pixels on a computer screen, each bacterium carried and reproduced its own imprint, and together they formed an image. The bacterium had formed a memory based on the membrane potential because the light induced changes in its potassium channels.

“When we disturbed these bacteria with light, they remembered and responded differently thereafter,” Professor Gürol Süel said in a Press release. “So for the first time, we can directly visualize which cells have memory. That is something we cannot visualize in the human brain.”

Knowledge of the brain.

The complexity of a human brain is many orders of magnitude greater than a bacterial biofilm. However, if bacteria can communicate with each other through ion channels, it is possible to imagine how the first neural networks may have arisen.

The hydra is a small animal with the simplest known nervous system. It has a neural network made up of only a few thousand neurons. Nerve cells form separate circuits that do not communicate with each other, each responsible for a single action. Could the earliest nervous systems have grown from simpler cells that network through ion channels?

Could we be looking at a biocomputer?

If we can print memories into biofilms, can we also encode more complex spatial memory patterns? The researchers think that this is possible and that it gives way to biological computing. It could even print “synthetic circuits on bacterial biofilms, activating different types of stones in separate areas of the biofilm,” according to the study.

Imagine live computers. Or would they be more aptly called laboratory-made brains?