Caption: Fungal memristors could be ideal interfaces for high-frequency bioelectronics, researchers say. Photo provided by John LaRocco.
An October 26, 2025 news item (rewritten slightly) on ScienceDaily announces research into ‘fungal computers’ from Ohio State University (OSU),
Fungal networks could one day replace the tiny metal components that process and store computer data, according to new research.
Mushrooms are known for their toughness and unusual biological properties, qualities that make them attractive for bioelectronics. This emerging field blends biology and technology to design innovative, sustainable materials for future computing systems.
Turning Mushrooms Into Living Memory Devices
Researchers at The Ohio State University recently discovered that edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be cultivated and guided to function as organic memristors. These components act like memory cells that retain information about previous electrical states.
“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,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”
Fungal electronics aren’t a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems, said LaRocco. This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors, which often require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers.
“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,” he said.
The study was recently published in the journal PLOS One.
To explore the new memristors’ capabilities, researchers cultured samples of shiitake and button mushrooms. Once mature, they were dehydrated to ensure long-term viability, connected to special electronic circuits, and then electrocuted at various voltages and frequencies.
“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said LaRocco. “Depending on the voltage and connectivity, we were seeing different performances.”
After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM – the computer memory that stores data – their mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy. However, performance dropped as the frequency of the electrical voltages increased, but much like an actual brain, it could be fixed by connecting more mushrooms to the circuit.
Overall, their research details how surprisingly easy it is to program and preserve mushrooms to behave in unexpected and useful ways, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. Moreover, it’s an example of how technology can advance when it relies on the natural world.
“Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect our environment and ensure that we preserve it for future generations,” said Tahmina.“So that could be one of the driving factors behind new bio-friendly ideas like these.”
Building on the flexibility mushrooms offer also suggests there are possibilities for scaling up fungal computing, said Tahmina. For instance, larger mushroom systems may be useful in edge computing and aerospace exploration; smaller ones in enhancing the performance of autonomous systems and wearable devices.
Organic memristors are still in early development, but future work could optimize the production process by improving cultivation techniques and miniaturizing the devices, as viable fungal memristors would need to be far smaller than what researchers achieved in this work.
“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.”
Other Ohio State co-authors include Ruben Petreaca, John Simonis and Justin Hill. This study was supported by the Honda Research Institute.
Where robots are concerned, mushrooms and other fungi aren’t usually considered as part of the equipment but one would be wrong according to a September 4, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily,
Building a robot takes time, technical skill, the right materials — and sometimes, a little fungus.
In creating a pair of new robots, Cornell University researchers cultivated an unlikely component, one found on the forest floor: fungal mycelia.
By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts.
…
An August 28, 2024 Cornell University news release (also on EurekAlert but published August 29, 2024) by David Nutt, which originated the news item, describes this (I’m tempted to call it, revolutionary) new technique, Note: Links have been removed.
“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” Shepherd [Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University] said. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”
In designing the robots of tomorrow, engineers have taken many of their cues from the animal kingdom, with machines that mimic the way living creatures move, sense their environment and even regulate their internal temperature through perspiration. Some robots have incorporated living material, such as cells from muscle tissue, but those complex biological systems are difficult to keep healthy and functional. It’s not always easy, after all, to keep a robot alive.
Mycelia are the underground vegetative part of mushrooms, and they have a number of advantages. They can grow in harsh conditions. They also have the ability to sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.
“If you think about a synthetic system – let’s say, any passive sensor – we just use it for one purpose. But living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” Mishra [Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab at Cornell University] said. “That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”
However, finding a way to integrate mushrooms and robots requires more than just tech savvy and a green thumb.
“You have to have a background in mechanical engineering, electronics, some mycology, some neurobiology, some kind of signal processing,” Mishra said. “All these fields come together to build this kind of system.”
Mishra collaborated with a range of interdisciplinary researchers. He consulted with Bruce Johnson, senior research associate in neurobiology and behavior, and learned how to record the electrical signals that are carried in the neuron-like ionic channels in the mycelia membrane. Kathie Hodge, associate professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, taught Mishra how to grow clean mycelia cultures, because contamination turns out to be quite a challenge when you are sticking electrodes in fungus.
The system Mishra developed consists of an electrical interface that blocks out vibration and electromagnetic interference and accurately records and processes the mycelia’s electrophysiological activity in real time, and a controller inspired by central pattern generators – a kind of neural circuit. Essentially, the system reads the raw electrical signal, processes it and identifies the mycelia’s rhythmic spikes, then converts that information into a digital control signal, which is sent to the robot’s actuators.
Two biohybrid robots were built: a soft robot shaped like a spider and a wheeled bot.
The robots completed three experiments. In the first, the robots walked and rolled, respectively, as a response to the natural continuous spikes in the mycelia’s signal. Then the researchers stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, which caused them to change their gaits, demonstrating mycelia’s ability to react to their environment. In the third scenario, the researchers were able to override the mycelia’s native signal entirely.
The implications go far beyond the fields of robotics and fungi.
“This kind of project is not just about controlling a robot,” Mishra said. “It is also about creating a true connection with the living system. Because once you hear the signal, you also understand what’s going on. Maybe that signal is coming from some kind of stresses. So you’re seeing the physical response, because those signals we can’t visualize, but the robot is making a visualization.”
Co-authors include Johnson, Hodge, Jaeseok Kim with the University of Florence, Italy, and undergraduate research assistant Hannah Baghdadi.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CROPPS Science and Technology Center; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture; and the NSF Signal in Soil program.
In fact, I have two items about fungi and I’m starting with the essay first.
Giving thanks for fungi
These foods are all dependent on microorganisms for their distinctive flavor. Credit: margouillat photo/Shutterstock.com
Antonis Rokas, professor at Venderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee, US), has written a November 25, 2019 essay for The Conversation (h/t phys.org Nov.26.19) featuring fungi and food, Note: Links have been removed),
…
I am an evolutionary biologist studying fungi, a group of microbes whose domestication has given us many tasty products. I’ve long been fascinated by two questions: What are the genetic changes that led to their domestication? And how on Earth did our ancestors figure out how to domesticate them?
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The hybrids in your lager
As far as domestication is concerned, it is hard to top the honing of brewer’s yeast. The cornerstone of the baking, brewing and wine-making industries, brewer’s yeast has the remarkable ability to turn the sugars of plant fruits and grains into alcohol. How did brewer’s yeast evolve this flexibility?
By discovering new yeast species and sequencing their genomes, scientists know that some yeasts used in brewing are hybrids; that is, they’re descendants of ancient mating unions of individuals from two different yeast species. Hybrids tend to resemble both parental species – think of wholpins (whale-dolphin) or ligers (lion-tiger).
… What is still unknown is whether hybridization is the norm or the exception in the yeasts that humans have used for making fermented beverages for millennia.
To address this question, a team led by graduate student Quinn Langdon at the University of Wisconsin and another team led by postdoctoral fellow Brigida Gallone at the Universities of Ghent and Leuven in Belgium examined the genomes of hundreds of yeasts involved in brewing and wine making. Their bottom line? Hybrids rule.
For example, a quarter of yeasts collected from industrial environments, including beer and wine manufacturers, are hybrids.
…
The mutants in your cheese
Comparing the genomes of domesticated fungi to their wild relatives helps scientists understand the genetic changes that gave rise to some favorite foods and drinks. But how did our ancestors actually domesticate these wild fungi? None of us was there to witness how it all started. To solve this mystery, scientists are experimenting with wild fungi to see if they can evolve into organisms resembling those that we use to make our food today.
Benjamin Wolfe, a microbiologist at Tufts University, and his team addressed this question by taking wild Penicillium mold and growing the samples for one month in his lab on a substance that included cheese. That may sound like a short period for people, but it is one that spans many generations for fungi.
The wild fungi are very closely related to fungal strains used by the cheese industry in the making of Camembert cheese, but look very different from them. For example, wild strains are green and smell, well, moldy compared to the white and odorless industrial strains.
For Wolfe, the big question was whether he could experimentally recreate, and to what degree, the process of domestication. What did the wild strains look and smell like after a month of growth on cheese? Remarkably, what he and his team found was that, at the end of the experiment, the wild strains looked much more similar to known industrial strains than to their wild ancestor. For example, they were white in color and smelled much less moldy.
…
… how did the wild strain turn into a domesticated version? Did it mutate? By sequencing the genomes of both the wild ancestors and the domesticated descendants, and measuring the activity of the genes while growing on cheese, Wolfe’s team figured out that these changes did not happen through mutations in the organisms’ genomes. Rather, they most likely occurred through chemical alterations that modify the activity of specific genes but don’t actually change the genetic code. Such so-called epigenetic modifications can occur much faster than mutations.
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Fantastic Fungi Futures (FFF) Nov. 29, Dec. 1, and Dec. 4, 2019 events in Toronto, Canada
The ArtSci Salon emailed me a November 23, 2019 announcement about a special series being presented in partnership with the Mycological Society of Toronto (MST) on the topic of fungi,
Fantastic Fungi Futures a discussion, a mini exhibition, a special screening, and a workshop revolving around Fungi and their versatile nature.
NOV 29 [2019], 6:00-8:00 PM Fantastic Fungi Futures (FFF): a roundtable discussion and popup exhibition.
Join us for a roundtable discussion. what are the potentials of fungi? Our guests will share their research, as well as professional and artistic practice dealing with the taxonomy and the toxicology, the health benefits and the potentials for sustainability, as well as the artistic and architectural virtues of fungi and mushrooms. The Exhibition will feature photos and objects created by local and Canadian artists who have been working with mushrooms and fungi.
This discussion is in anticipation of the special screening of Fantastic Fungi at the HotDocs Cinema on Dec 1 [2019] our guests:James Scott,Occupational & Environmental Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, UofT; Marshall Tyler, Director of Research, Field Trip, Toronto; Rotem Petranker, PhD student, Social Psychology, York University; Nourin Aman, PhD student, fungal biology and Systematics lab, Punjab University; Sydney Gram, PhD student, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology student researcher (UofT/ROM); [and] Tosca Teran, Interdisciplinary artist.
DEC. 4 [2019], 7:00-10:00PM Multi-species entanglements:Sculpting with Mycelium, @InterAccess, 950 Dupont St., Unit 1
This workshop is a continuation of ArtSci Salon’s Fantastic Fungi Futures event and the HotDocs screening of Fantastic Fungi.this workshop is open to public to attend, however, pre-registration is required. $5.00 to form a mycelium bowl to take home.
During this workshop Tosca Teran introduces the amazing potential of Mycelium for collaboration at the intersection of art and science. Participants learn how to transform their kitchens and closets in to safe, mini-Mycelium biolabs and have the option to leave the workshop with a live Mycelium planter/bowl form, as well as a wide array of possibilities of how they might work with this sustainable bio-material.
Bios
Nourin Aman is a PhD student at fungal biology and Systematics lab at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. She is currently a visiting PhD student at the Mycology lab, Royal Ontario Museum. Her research revolves around comparison between macrofungal biodiversity of some reserve forests of Punjab, Pakistan.Her interest is basically to enlist all possible macrofungi of reserve forests under study and describe new species as well from area as our part of world still has many species to be discovered and named. She will be discussing factors which are affecting the fungal biodiversity in these reserve forests.
Sydney Gram is an Ecology & Evolutionary Biology student researcher (UofT/ROM)
Rotem Petranker- Bsc in psychology from the University of Toronto and a MA in social psychology from York University. Rotem is currently a PhD student in York’s clinical psychology program. His main research interest is affect regulation, and the way it interacts with sustained attention, mind wandering, and creativity. Rotem is a founding member oft the Psychedelic Studies Research Program at the University of Toronto, has published work on microdosing, and presented original research findings on psychedelic research in several conferences. He feels strongly that the principles of Open Science are necessary in order to do good research, and is currently in the process of starting the first lab study of microdosing in Canada.
Marshall Tyler– Director of Research, Field Trip. Marshall is a scientist with a deep interest in psychoactive molecules. His passion lies in guiding research to arrive at a deeper understanding of consciousness with the ultimate goal of enhancing wellbeing. At Field Trip, he is helping to develop a lab in Jamaica to explore the chemical and biological complexities of psychoactive fungi.
Tosca Teran, aka Nanotopia, is an Multi-disciplinary artist. Her work has been featured at SOFA New York, Culture Canada, and The Toronto Design Exchange. Tosca has been awarded artist residencies with The Ayatana Research Program in Ottawa and The Icelandic Visual Artists Association through Sím, Reykjavik Iceland and Nes artist residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. In 2019 she was one of the first Bio-Artists in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre as part of the Alien Agencies Collective. A recipient of the 2019 BigCi Environmental Award at Wollemi National Park within the UNESCO World Heritage site in the Greater Blue Mountains. Tosca started collaborating artistically with Algae, Physarum polycephalum, and Mycelium in 2016, translating biodata from non-human organisms into music.@MothAntler @nanopodstudio www.toscateran.com www.nanotopia.net8
A trailer has been provided for the movie mentioned in the announcement (from the Fantastic Fungi screening webpage on the Mycological Society of Toronto website),
