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MIT News
MIT engineers connect bacteria to create living transistors
MIT engineers connect bacteria to create living transistors
By wiring together colonies of these bacteria, the researchers built circuits that can perform complicated calculations.
Anne Trafton<br>MIT News
Publication Date:
August 17, 2026
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MIT researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing them to create “living circuit boards” like those shown.
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Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News
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Caption:
MIT researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing them to create “living circuit boards” like those shown.
Credits:
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News
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MIT researchers have engineered bacteria that can function as transistors, allowing the team to create living “circuit boards” that can be printed onto a growth medium in a Petri dish.<br>In electrical circuits, transistors function as switches that can turn current on or off. In the biological circuits that the researchers have created, bacterial switches control the flow of small molecules, which send signals to downstream circuit components.<br>The research team designed two different transistors, along with three bacterial strains that relay information between the transistors, giving them the building blocks they need to design nearly any type of circuit. In a new study, they used these cells to create circuits that can add two or three inputs, or send one input to a specific location in the circuit.<br>“We’ve built some initial computer architecture components that are commonly used, but any operation can be built with these five strains,” says Hamid Doosthosseini PhD ’25, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the new study.<br>Using this approach, the researchers hope to develop circuits that one day could coat plant leaves or roots, where they could compute to sense and respond to environmental conditions such as drought or attack by pests.<br>Christopher Voigt, head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, is the senior author of the paper, which was recently published in Nature Chemical Biology. Former MIT postdoc Haorong Chen is also an author of the paper.<br>Cells as transistors<br>When designing synthetic biology circuits, researchers typically engineer cells to express proteins and transcription factors that interact to perform a task such as sensing a target molecule, which then triggers production of a specific output.<br>These simple circuits can perform various logic functions, but they must use unique transcription factors to avoid crosstalk within the circuit. There is a limited number of transcription factors that can be used for these circuits, which limits the overall complexity that can be achieved in a single cell. Additionally, putting too many circuits in one cell can overburden the cell’s protein production machinery.<br>In the new paper, the researchers took a different approach: Instead of building an entire circuit into one cell, they designed cells that could act as transistors. These transistors can then be combined in different ways to create a variety of circuits.<br>To create the transistors, the researchers chose a bacterium called Pantoea agglomerans, which commonly grows on surfaces, including...