In the humid glow of a university greenhouse, slices of humble shiitake mushrooms pulse with electrical signals, etching bits of data into their fibrous cores. This isn’t a quirky side project for foodies—it’s a serious bid to rethink how we store information in an era of escalating electronic waste. Researchers have coaxed these everyday edibles into acting as organic memory devices, blending biology and bits in a way that could make silicon chips seem like relics of a less sustainable age.
The work, detailed in a recent paper in PLOS One, comes from an unlikely alliance of mycologists and computer scientists at The Ohio State University. Lead researcher John LaRocco, a research scientist in the College of Medicine’s psychiatry department, sees in fungi a mirror to the human brain. “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 explained. That efficiency, he added, “can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”
At the heart of the experiment lies the memristor, a compact component that “remembers” its resistance to electrical flow, much like a synapse holds a fleeting thought. Traditional versions rely on rare-earth metals and energy-guzzling fabrication plants, contributing to the mountains of e-waste that choke landfills worldwide. The fungal alternative? Dehydrated shiitake (Lentinula edodes) and button mushrooms, wired with simple probes and “trained” through low-voltage zaps.
Here’s how it unfolds: Electrodes pierce the mushroom’s cap or stem, where natural ion channels—tiny highways for charged particles—shift under applied current. A forward pulse might encode a binary 1 by boosting conductivity; reverse it for a 0. Remarkably, these states linger for hours or even days, even after the power cuts out. In tests, the setup flipped through 5,850 signals per second with about 90 percent accuracy, holding steady for two months of intermittent use. Higher frequencies dimmed performance, but stacking more slices in parallel perked it right up.
This isn’t the first whisper of bio-computing from the fungal kingdom. Across the Atlantic, at the University of the West of England, cybernetician Andrew Adamatzky has long championed “mycocomputing.” His team’s earlier foray, published in Science Advances, embedded electrodes in fresh shiitake mycelium—the root-like network that fans out underground—and clocked over 1,000 read-write cycles at whisper-soft millivolts. Like LaRocco’s dehydrated prototypes, Adamatzky’s version degrades into nutrient-rich soil, not toxic sludge. “We’re asking what nature already knows about memory and conductivity,” Adamatzky noted, underscoring a philosophy that views fungi not as food, but as forgotten engineers.
The promise extends beyond lab benches. Imagine soil sensors in drought-prone farms that compute moisture levels on-site, then compost away harmlessly. Or wearable health monitors for underserved communities, powered by ambient energy and fungal smarts, sidestepping the battery boom’s environmental toll. In aerospace, where every gram counts, lightweight mushroom modules could crunch data for drones scouting wildfires or mapping remote terrains. “Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups,” LaRocco reflected, “but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits.”
Yet, for all its earthy allure, fungal tech faces thorny realities. These devices switch states in milliseconds—admirable for biology, but glacial next to silicon’s nanosecond sprint. They’re finicky with humidity and tough to miniaturize without losing that organic edge. Skeptics, including materials experts at Stanford, point out the gap: “It’s clever, but we’re nowhere near replacing CMOS,” one unaffiliated researcher quipped, referring to the gold-standard silicon architecture. Still, as climate pressures mount and rare minerals grow scarcer, the field’s quiet persistence feels less like whimsy and more like wisdom.
From Ohio’s controlled chambers to Bristol’s wilder speculations, these mushroom musings remind us that innovation often sprouts in unexpected soil. In a world wiring itself toward overload, perhaps the path forward lies not in forging harder, but in growing softer—sustainable, inclusive, and alive with possibility.
