BIOLOGY
The First Fully Programmable Bacterial Colony: Self-Organizing Biocomputers Are No Longer Fiction
A research team at MIT has engineered a bacterial colony that executes arbitrary Boolean logic operations using quorum sensing as the communication layer. The colony is fully programmable via a simple plasmid library, executes AND, OR, NOT, and XOR gates at the population level, and the output can be read optically. This isn't a proof-of-concept demonstration. The system is modular, reliable across 50 independent trials, and the complete parts list is available on Addgene. Living biocomputers are now a tractable engineering problem.