What Would An E. Coli Do If It Were Much, Much Bigger?
The robot controlled by simulated bacteriaVirginia TechThe colonies of bacteria living on your body do more than help you digest food. According to models created by researchers from Virginia Tech, bacteria could control an inanimate host like a robot."Basically we were trying to find out from the mathematical model if we could build a living microbiome on a nonliving host and control the host through the microbiome," said Warren Ruder, a professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech and one of the study authors in a press release. "We found that robots may indeed be able to have a working brain."The study, published yesterday in Scientific Reports, is built on several mathematical models. In the first, a computer simulates a community of E. coli bacteria with different sets of genes, engineered to glow either red or green depending on what they ate. The model predicted...