Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, The Copenhagen Voice, 18 March 2010

A Danish-led international research project will link computer technology, biotechnology and nanoscience in an artificial living cell that imitates the internal functions a biological cell. Self-repair, self-assembly and self-replication are cell functions that will be imitated in a project with the potential to change our lives.

The world may soon see a new revolution - useable ‘living’ devices in the energy, medical and computer fields - if research into ‘living technology’, a ground-breaking field at the crossroads between computer technology, biotechnology and nanoscience, is successful.

While the industrial revolution mechanised production with factories and the information revolution mechanised information processing with computers, “We’re paving the way for a new revolution,” says professor Steen Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark. “We’re combining production and information processing in an artificial sub-cellular matrix, which imitates living cells found in plants, animals and humans.”

The researchers have started creating an artificial sub-cellular matrix, called Matrix for Chemical IT or MATCHIT. This imitates internal functions of a biological cell - information processing, self-programming, self-repair, self-assembly and self-replication. MACHIT can make its own decisions – just like a biological cell operates as a combined information processing and production machine, identifying and creating what is needed.

The scientists, however, programme MACHIT’s main tasks by combining the technology of MEMS (micro-electronic-mechanical systems – sometimes called micro-machines) with soft nano- and micro-scaled functional materials as well as a chemistry that could be similar to the biochemistry found in the earliest organisms on earth.

“The artificial sub-cellular matrix is made up of chemical containers on a silicon chip,” says Rasmussen. Through DNA tagging and DNA computing, the containers interact inside minute channels on the chip. “We use micro-cameras to feed information about the containers into a computer, which calculates how electrodes or channels are opened or turned off. As a result, the containers can be guided around the chip and provide what the system needs to complete its programmed tasks.”

Rasmussen adds, “The technology we’re developing is different from anything we know today. It will be based on the same principles as life. If your mobile phone breaks, somebody needs to fix it. But if you cut your hand, it heals itself. Living technology has potential applications in all sectors of our society and therefore has the potential to change how we live. The possibilities are endless – both beautiful and scary.”

Rasmussen is the project coordinator for a consortium of researchers kick-started the project at the European Center for Living Technology in Venice earlier this month.

The international consortium comprises: the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) and the Mærsk McKinney Møller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark; the Biomolecular Information Processing (BioMIP) group and the Organic Chemistry I group at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany; the Crown Human Genome Center and the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; and the European Center for Living Technology, Italy.

The research project has received €2.8 million euros funding over three years from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development for the period 2007 to 2013.