Biochips made from mushrooms rival power of manmade semiconductors

Photo caption: Fungal memristors could be ideal interfaces for high-frequency bioelectronics. Photos provided by: John LaRocco et al. / Ohio State University. CC BY 4.0 (two photos were placed on one background). Article by Bronwyn Thompson. New Atlas – November 2, 2025. Research article: PLOS One.

They may be better known for stir-fries than supercomputing, but shiitake mushrooms have now been harnessed to function as living processors, storing and recalling data like a semiconductor chip but with almost no environmental footprint. Scientists at Ohio State University have shown that fungi can be trained to act like memristors – microscopic components used to process and store data in computer chips. The team found that shiitake-based devices demonstrated similar reproducible memory effects to semiconductor-based chips and could be used to create other types of low-cost, environmentally friendly, neural-inspired components. […]

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