Engineered Bacteria Computationally Solve Chemically Generated 2X2 Maze Problems

Abstract

Maze generating and solving are challenging problems in mathematics and computing. Here we generated simple 2X2 maze problems applying four chemicals and created a set of engineered bacteria, which in a mixed population worked as a computational solver for any such problem. The input-output matrices of a mathematical maze were mapped through a truth table, where the 1 and 0 logic values of four chemical inputs determined the sixteen different 2X2 maze problems on a chemical space. Our engineered bacteria, which consisted of six different genetic logic circuits and distributed among six cell populations processed the chemical information and solved the problems by expressing or not expressing four different fluorescent proteins according to the input-output matrices. The three available solutions were visualized by glowing bacteria and for the thirteen cases, where there was no solution no bacteria glowed. This work may have significance in cell based computing and synthetic biology.