Every device you use — your phone, your laptop, the earbuds calculating noise cancellation in real time — runs on chips built from rare minerals extracted from the earth, processed in enormous factories, and eventually destined to become toxic waste. That supply chain is expensive, energy-intensive, and environmentally damaging. A team at The Ohio State University thinks part of the answer might be sitting in a grocery store produce section: shiitake mushrooms.

The researchers have demonstrated that dried shiitake fungal tissue can function as a memristor — a combination of "memory" and "resistor" — which is an electronic component that regulates current flow and retains a memory of how much electrical charge has previously passed through it. Unlike a simple on/off switch, a memristor's resistance changes based on its history, making it capable of storing information in a way that more closely resembles how the brain encodes memory than how conventional digital chips do. Memristors have been studied as candidates for next-generation computing hardware for years, but they have typically been built from metal oxides and other inorganic materials. The Ohio State findings, published in PLOS One, show that organic fungal tissue can replicate the same electrical behavior — naturally, cheaply, and without a factory.

The experimental process was more hands-on than you might expect from cutting-edge computing research. The team grew shiitake and button mushrooms to maturity, then dehydrated them to lock in their physical structure. They attached the preserved mushroom samples to custom circuits using fine wires and probes placed at different points along the fungal surface. Because distinct sections of the mushroom carry different electrical properties, the positioning of the probes significantly influenced the results. The team then ran controlled electrical currents through the mushrooms across a range of voltages and frequencies — frequency here referring to how many times per second the signal pulses — measuring how the tissue responded.

After two months of testing, the results were more capable than the researchers anticipated. The mushroom-based memristors could switch between distinct electrical states up to 5,850 times per second, maintaining roughly 90 percent accuracy. Performance declined at the highest frequencies tested, but the team discovered a structural fix: connecting multiple mushroom samples together in a network restored stability. That behavior directly parallels how biological neural networks function. Individual neurons in your brain — the specialized cells that transmit electrical and chemical signals — are imperfect in isolation, but interconnected networks of billions of them produce reliable, high-speed cognition. The mushroom circuits were, in a very real sense, behaving like a rudimentary brain.

That parallel to neural architecture is not incidental — it is one of the core reasons this research is significant. Lead author John LaRocco, a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State's College of Medicine, explained that devices which mimic neural activity can operate on dramatically less power when idle, because the brain itself is extraordinarily energy-efficient compared to traditional silicon chips. A conventional laptop chip draws continuous power just to maintain its state; a brain-inspired system can sit in low-power mode until it is needed. That distinction matters enormously at scale. Data centers worldwide already consume roughly one to two percent of global electricity, and demand is rising sharply as artificial intelligence workloads expand. Hardware that consumes less standby power could translate directly into reduced energy use across millions of devices.

The environmental case for fungal computing extends beyond energy efficiency. Conventional semiconductors — materials like silicon that conduct electricity only under specific conditions — require rare earth minerals, hazardous chemical processes, and complex global supply chains to produce. When the devices they power reach the end of their life, they become electronic waste, one of the fastest-growing categories of global waste, much of which ends up in landfills where toxic materials leach into soil and water. Fungal components are biodegradable, meaning microbial activity in soil naturally breaks them down without releasing harmful residue. They are also inexpensive to grow and do not depend on geographically restricted mineral deposits, which could make advanced computing technology accessible in places currently cut off from the global semiconductor supply chain.

Co-author Qudsia Tahmina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State, pointed to several application areas where fungal circuits could have near-term relevance. Larger systems might find use in edge computing — a model where data is processed close to the point of collection rather than sent to distant servers — or in the electronics used for aerospace exploration, where biodegradability and low mass are genuine engineering assets. Smaller, more refined fungal components could improve wearable health monitors or power autonomous systems that need to operate efficiently in unpredictable environments. The architecture that makes a mushroom network stable under electrical stress — distributed, redundant, self-reinforcing — is precisely the architecture engineers want in devices that must function reliably without human oversight.

Significant challenges remain before fungal memristors can compete with silicon at scale. Current components need to be miniaturized substantially, cultivation methods need to be standardized for consistent electrical performance, and accuracy at high frequencies must improve. But LaRocco offered a striking perspective on the barrier to entry: the basic research, he said, could be conducted with equipment as modest as a compost heap and some homemade electronics. The materials are not locked inside restricted facilities or rare mines — they fruit from soil on every continent. The computing revolution that began with sand refined into silicon chips may yet find one of its next chapters written in mycelium, the branching thread-like networks that mushrooms use to grow, sense their environment, and, it now turns out, remember.

Source: ScienceDaily

Technology

Mushrooms Could Be Used to Create Future Computer Chips