A computer that relies on fungal mycelium to store information could one day be a low-cost alternative to the current generation of memory hardware.

Using plain old shiitake mushrooms (Lentinula edodes), scientists have built working memristors – circuitry elements that ‘remember’ their past electrical states – not from titanium dioxide or silicon, but the root-like (and somewhat neuron-like) part of a fungus called the mycelium.

The result is a memristor with performance comparable to that of a silicon-based chip, but potentially low-cost, scalable, and environmentally friendly in ways many computer components today are not.

Related: Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body And Let It Run Wild

“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,” says psychiatrist John LaRocco of Ohio State University. “That’s something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”

The development of a computer that behaves like a brain requires the development of components that also behave like parts of the brain. One of these requirements is memristors that can act like synapses – junctions between neurons that manage the flow of information.

Scientists have considered using mushrooms as computer parts, not least because mycelial networks behave in ways that are similar to neural networks. They are structured similarly and transmit information using electrical and chemical signalsjust like a brain.

But the fact they aren’t actually brains means some engineering is needed to make them do what scientists need them to do.

The team used shiitake mushrooms because this species is particularly robust, resilient, and resistant to stressors such as radiation. The researchers seeded nine samples in substrate-filled petri dishes with shiitake spores and grew them under controlled temperature and humidity conditions.

frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>

When the mycelium had grown enough to cover the petri dish, the researchers dried out each sample in a well-ventilated area in direct sunlight to ensure its long-term viability. Thus prepared, each sample was ready to be put to work to test its computational chops, connected to a purpose-built circuit to be flooded with electrical currents.

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

The researchers achieved a performance of 5,850 Hertz, with an accuracy of 90 percent from their ‘mushristor’ – that is, it switches signals at a speed of about 5,850 times per second, or one switch every 170 microseconds or so. The slowest commercially available memristors start at a little under twice that speedso the experiment is extremely promising for the first baby steps.

The researchers also found that as the electrical voltage increased, the mushroom’s performance decreased. They were able to compensate for this by adding more mushrooms to the circuit.

You’re not going to have a mycelial computer powering your doomscrolling any time soon. Still, the findings do indicate that this is an auspicious avenue for future research and development toward accessible, low-cost, and biodegradable components, with potential applications ranging from personal devices to aerospace.

“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,” LaRocco says. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.”

As the researchers note in their paper“The future of computing could be fungal.”

The research has been published in PLOS One.