A dehydrated shiitake mushroom, connected to electrodes and subjected to controlled electrical discharges. It looks like the beginning of an improvised lab experiment, like those you do in high school with potatoes and LEDs. Only this time the result isn't a flickering light, but a functioning organic chip. A biological memristor capable of processing 5.850 signals per second with 90% accuracy.
The researchers ofOhio State University They've proven it: mushrooms can replace semiconductors. It's not a provocation, it's bioelectronics (and no, you don't need to season them first). Mycelium functions on its own, without rare minerals or energy-hungry factories. Simply cultivate it, dehydrate it, and connect it. It works.
Organic Memristors: What They Are and Why They Matter
The memristor is an electronic device that remembers past electrical states even without power. It's like a resistor with memory: the current flowing through it changes its internal resistance, and this change persists. Traditional computers require continuous power to maintain data in RAM. Not here. The mushroom stores the information itself. The study published in PLOS One from the team led by John LaRocco demonstrates that dried shiitake mushrooms can switch between electrical states with reliability comparable to silicon chips. The interesting part isn't just that it works. It works without rare minerals mined in mines, without billion-dollar manufacturing processes, without industrial energy consumption.
LaRocco explains the advantage like this:
“Being able to develop microchips that mimic neural activity means that they don’t need a lot of power on standby or when the machine is not being used.”
An organic chip that behaves like a biological neuron consumes a fraction of the energy required by traditional semiconductors. And it biodegrades completely when no longer needed.
How Organic Mushroom Chips Work
The researchers grew shiitake mushrooms and champignonThey dehydrated them to ensure long-term stability, then connected them to electronic circuits. For two months, they applied variable voltages and frequencies, monitoring their performance.
Results? The fungal memristor switches between electrical states up to 5.850 times per second with 90% accuracy. Performance drops if you increase the electrical frequency too much, but this is easily solved. Simply connect more mushrooms to the circuit, just like the brain adds neurons to handle complex tasks.
Global airport radar systems emit a combined power of 2×10¹⁵ wattShiitake mushrooms turned into organic chips could process some of those signals while consuming a fraction of the energy.
Secondo Nature Electronics, biological memristors represent a promising solution to dramatically reduce data center power consumption.
Bioelectronics: Why Mushrooms Beat Silicon
Traditional chips require lithium, cobalt, and rare earths. They require megawatt-consuming factories, toxic chemical processes, and accumulating electronic waste. Mushrooms don't. They grow anywhere there's organic substrate and moisture. They're processed using simple techniques. They biodegrade when they're no longer needed. Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and associate professor of electrical engineering atOhio State, summarizes:
"Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect the environment. This could be one of the driving forces behind new bio-friendly ideas like these."
As I told you a few years agoBiological memristors are already proving capable of connecting artificial and biological neurons through global networks. Now we know we can grow them directly in edible mushrooms.
Scalability and real-world applications
LaRocco is terse about the possibilities of “fungal” organic chips:
"Everything you need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost pile and some homemade electronics, or as large as a grow house with prefabricated models. All are achievable with the resources we have now."
Fungal memristors could find application in systems edge computing (local processing without a data center), in low-power wearable devices, and in distributed environmental sensors. Larger systems could be used in aerospace exploration, where weight and reliability matter more than raw power.
The team is already working to further miniaturize the devices and simultaneously optimize the cultivation techniques.
Organic Chips: The Future is Biodegradable
Fungi are not the only candidate biological material. Recent searches on Nature Communications. They demonstrated memristors operating at biological voltages (40-100 mV) using protein nanowires extracted from the bacterium geobacter sulfurreducensOther teams are experimenting with egg albumin, silk, and organic polymers. Bioelectronics is becoming a mature field.
Of course, organic chips are still in their early stages of development. Miniaturization remains a challenge: current devices are still too large to compete with commercial semiconductors. But the direction is clear. In ten years, we could have computers that grow in greenhouse factories, run on solar energy, repair themselves, and compost themselves when they become obsolete.
In the meantime, the message is simple: the computing of the future could literally grow on its own. All it takes is the right substrate and some power.
Mushrooms already do it.
