Photo credit: Jun Yao
A team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst developed an artificial neuron with the same size, power consumption, and performance as the real thing. This device produces electrical signals, responds to drugs such as dopamine, and even communicates with genuine heart cells.
Shuai Fu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, led the project under the supervision of professor Jun Yao. Their goal was to basically create a synthetic neuron that functions like those found in the human brain, the latter of which are adaptable, digesting information from simple tasks like exercise to sophisticated thoughts.
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The breakthrough is based on a tiny component called a memristor, a type of memory resistor that can “remember” electrical states. This memristor’s special sauce is protein nanowires from the bacteria Geobacter sulfurreducens. This bacteria found in muddy riverbeds makes conductive lines so small that current silicon circuitry looks like heavy machinery. These nanowires allow the memristor to flip states at 60 millivolts and 1.7 nanoamps, similar to neurons in the human brain. Earlier artificial neurons required ten times the voltage and one hundred times the power, rendering them unsuitable for real-world applications.
Fu and Yao used this memristor in a simple circuit to mimic a neuron’s electrical patterns. Real neurons don’t fire on demand; they gradually store up charge and then release a rapid spike before resetting during a brief pause called the refractory period. The team’s circuit does every step of this: it accumulates charge, spikes precisely and then pauses before continuing.
They also incorporated sensors to detect ions such as sodium and neurotransmitters like dopamine. It was then linked to human heart cells in a petri dish. When they added norepinephrine, a medication that speeds up heartbeats, the artificial neuron detected the cells’ response in real time, showing it could listen to and understand biological signals.
In medicine, these neurons could enable implants that repair damaged brain circuits or brain-machine interfaces, allowing paralyzed patients to operate prosthesis with their thoughts. Even in medication research, they may track cell health in real time and demonstrate how novel treatments affect living tissue.
[Source]
