The Technion researchers succeeded in developing a biological computer that knows how to color bacteria

Biological computers arouse great interest in the scientific community not because they expect that these machines will be able to compete with electronic computers in terms of calculation speed, efficiency and computational power," explains Professor Ehud Kinan from the Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion

Technion researchers have developed a biological computer, which is built from DNA molecules and enzymes and can cause biological phenomena. This is the first time that a molecular computational process leads to a visible feature of an animal. During this study, the computer determined the color of bacteria: blue or white. This is reported by the scientific journal ChemBioChem.
"Biological computers arouse great interest in the scientific community not because they expect that these machines will be able to compete with electronic computers in terms of calculation speed, efficiency and computational power," explains Professor Ehud Kinan from the Technion Faculty of Chemistry. "The main advantage of biomolecular computers is mainly due to their ability to communicate directly with biological systems and even with living beings. This is because all the components of the biological computer, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that participate in a chain of pre-programmed chemical events."
Professor Keenan, who carried out the research with the Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion, Professor Yuval Shaham, with the Masters Elisabetta Kosui and Michal Sorani and with Dr. Noa Ravid, clarifies that according to its basic definition, the computer is a machine, which is made up of four components: hardware, Software, input and output. All the computers we know are electronic computers, that is, machines, in which the input and output are electronic signals, their hardware is a collection of metal components and plastic materials, electric wires, transistors, capacitors, etc., while the software is a collection of instructions, which are given to the machine through electronic signals. "Unlike the electronic computer, there are machines in which all four of these components are molecules," he says. "For example, all biological systems and even the entire living body are actually computers of this type. Each of us constitutes a biological-molecular computer, that is, a machine, in which all the above components are molecules, which "talk" to each other in a logical manner. Both the hardware and the software of the biological computer are complex biological molecules, which activate each other in defined chemical reactions. The input is a molecule, which undergoes certain processing, i.e. chemical changes, according to predetermined laws. The result of the calculation, or the output of this computer, is also a defined molecule."
"Our research work is a step up, because it demonstrates that a properly designed computing machine (in the present case, a machine called a finite automaton), can create an output in the form of a unique biological property, while communicating directly with living beings. The next steps in this long road will be the introduction of the entire computer system into living cells or into whole tissues. An important step forward in this direction was recently reported by Dr. Jacob Benanson and his partners at Harvard and Princeton Universities. The research works of both groups emphasize the inherent potential in the utilization of biomolecular computing machines for the needs of diagnosing diseases and treating them automatically."