Edible mushrooms may be the computer chips of the future

Mushrooms might be the last thing you’d expect inside a computer, but they could help change how we store and process data.

The tiny chips that run our machines – called semiconductors – come with a cost. They rely on rare, pricey materials. They burn through electricity. And when they’re tossed, they leave behind toxic waste.

Now imagine swapping out some of those computer chips for mushrooms – not in a sci-fi fantasy – but in a real, lab-tested, edible-mushroom kind of way.

Mushrooms with memory

Shiitake mushrooms aren’t just great in stir-fry. They’re also tough, flexible, and surprisingly smart – at least electrically.

Their underground root-like structure, called a mycelium, is known to conduct signals in patterns that are similar to how brains fire neurons.

Scientists have been exploring fungi for bioelectronics for a while, but until recently, most attempts felt more like experiments than real progress.

Living memory devices

Researchers from The Ohio State University found a way to grow common edible mushrooms and train them to act like a data chip.

Specifically, the team built what’s called a memristor – a device that can “remember” its past electrical activity, kind of like short-term memory in a brain.

Once the mushrooms were fully grown, the experts dried them out to make them stable and hooked them up to electric circuits. The team ran different voltages through different parts of the mushrooms to see how they responded.

“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said John LaRocco, the lead researcher on the project. “Depending on the voltage and connectivity, we were seeing different performances.”

Testing mushroom memory chips

In tests, the mushroom-based memory chip switched between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy. That’s slower than top-tier commercial chips, but still impressive.

According to the researchers, the mushroom-based memory chip also worked a lot like the brain.

When the system started to lose accuracy at higher speeds, the team simply added more mushrooms to balance things out.

Microchips that mimic neural activity

Traditional semiconductors are made from silicon, copper, and sometimes rare-earth minerals. Mining those materials and processing them is expensive, wasteful, and harmful to the environment.

In some cases, data centers consume more power than entire countries. That’s where mushrooms offer something radical: a cheap, biodegradable, low-energy alternative.

“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don’t need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn’t being used,” LaRocco said. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”

This is especially important in a world facing climate challenges and energy pressure.

“Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect our environment and ensure that we preserve it for future generations,” said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study. “So that could be one of the driving factors behind new bio-friendly ideas like these.”

Mushroom memory chips are flexible

Fungal electronics might sound niche, but this is already showing serious potential. These mushroom chips aren’t just green alternatives – they’re flexible in how they can be used.

Small versions could support wearable tech or self-driving cars. Larger systems might help process data at the edge – right where it’s collected, like in sensors or remote machines. There’s even talk of using them in space tech, where low power and flexibility matter a lot.

“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” LaRocco said.

The researchers say there’s still work to do. The devices need to be miniaturized to be practical, and growing mushrooms in a controlled, scalable way takes time and planning. But the barriers aren’t insurmountable.

“Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates,” said LaRocco. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.”

The full study was published in the journal PLOS One.

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