An MIT biotech researcher has been able to run the iconic computer game Doom using actual gut bacteria. Lauren Ramlan didn’t get the game going on a digital simulation of bacteria, but turned actual bacteria into pixels to display the 30-year-old FPS, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.
Specifically, Ramlan created a display inside of a cell wall made entirely of E. coli bacteria. The 32x48 1-bit display may not win any resolution awards, but who cares, right? It’s Doom running on bacteria. The researcher dosed the bacteria with fluorescent proteins to get them to light up just like digital pixels.
Yeah it’s more like displaying a picture of the doom intro screen rather than actually computing it. Still cool but vastly different than computing the drawing functionality of the game.