New Technology uses Bacterial Communities to Solve Complex Problems

A new system has been developed that utilizes bacterial communities to solve complex problems autonomously. The designed algorithms help to synchronize different bacteria according to the bacteria's natural capabilities and mechanisms of communication, such as bacterial conjugation and quorum sensing.

Bacterial conjugation is the mechanism of transferring genetic information from a donor cell to a receptor cell. Quorum sensing is a process for controlling genetic expression depending on cell density. The new system was developed at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's (Spain) Facultad de Informáticas, and modifies and manipulates these mechanisms of communication among bacteria to achieve computations with basic decision-making systems.

The newly designed architectures have been used in computational applications, including autonomous complex problem solving by bacterial communities and the design of a population oscillator similar to a client/server architecture. The client/server architecture is a major model in computer science for developing data systems where the transactions are divided into independent processes that cooperate with each other to exchange information, services, or resources.

The applications of the system, which has been validated both at the biologic (expertise) and computational (simulation) levels, cover scientific fields as separate as medicine or ecology. Research has focused on their development to design communications architectures for multistrain bacterial communities. On the one hand, a heterogeneous community using bacterial conjugation as a key communications protocol was designed. This heterogeneous community is based on the plan of differentiating computational instructions stored in the bacterial chromosome of the data sets stored in plasmid vectors. Plasmids or vectors are extrachromosomal circular or linear DNA molecules that are replicated and transcribed independently of chromosomal DNA.

On the other hand, using quorum sensing in the communications protocol, the research realized an emerging behavior by mixing several functionally different strains of the same community. This led to the design of hardware devices using nonelectric molecular technology based on biology as instead of electronics as is usual practice in computing.

The tactic developed in this research has led to the design of a bacterium that can perform a specific purpose independently of the rest of the system, thereby enhancing component reusability. This research is another step forward in the development of an interdisciplinary science, synthetic biology, and bacterial computing, a product of the fusion of biology and computer science.

This new discipline has led to the construction of molecular devices acting as rudimentary computers and performing defined logical calculation tasks. Engineering is an aid for undertaking the design of these biosystems as a formalized component configuration task. The underlying hypothesis is to construct living systems with functionalities that are not found in nature.

This research was developed by informatics engineer Ángel Goñi Moreno as his Ph.D. thesis defended at the Facultad de Informática in May 2010.

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