Scientists Design Biocomputer Using 3D Cell Cultures
Computation, in a technical sense, is a standardized process by which input data are processed according to prescribed rules (algorithm) and are converted into output data. While computers do not “know” where the data come from, normally they represent a particular reality.
There is one realm where we largely stay helpless and can neither truly understand what is going on, nor affect the course of events – our own organisms and other biological systems. It is true that huge steps have been made in understanding basic biological processes as well as disease-linked abnormalities in humans. It is also true that any medical treatment is an attempt to control a disease, and we are witnessing an ever increasing number of efficient drug-based and surgical interventions.
Therefore, the idea to gather and process information from various parts of our bodies, perhaps even individual cells, and use these data to control biological processes in real time, averting disease-linked transformations, is very appealing.
Scientists have now designed a versatile plug-and-play molecular-computation platform, by engineering nine different cell populations with genetic programs, each of which encodes a defined computational instruction.
When assembled into 3D cultures, these engineered cell
consortia execute programmable multicellular full-adder logics in response to three trigger compounds.The team, comprising researchers from ETH Zurich and University of Basel, has managed to structure the cells so that the biocomputer can create logic gates, which take two inputs and process them to create one output. This has allowed the team to accomplish “full-adder computations,” where different cells do small parts of a calculation and then add the results together to get a complete answer.
For their study, the genetic circuit itself was designed using existing machinery in cells called a promoter. The DNA snippet, a small portion of DNA associated with one or more genes, first transcribes a cell’s DNA to RNA and then translates that into proteins. The team inserted four extra DNA snippets after a promoter. One of those snippets was designed to produce a green fluorescent protein (GFP), which lights up a cell when switched on by a particular drug.
They were able to build 113 different circuits with a 96.5 percent success rate. A powerful computer circuitry leads to complex computational processes, similarly, cells genetically engineered to work as minicomputers can be more or less powerful based on their engineering.
