Mushrooms might soon do more than top your pizza—they could help power the computers of the future.
A new study suggests that common fungi, like shiitake mushrooms, can be turned into living memory chips capable of storing and processing information, much like the hardware inside modern computers.
Researchers from The Ohio State University have shown that mushrooms can be trained to behave like memristors—tiny electronic components that “remember” the electrical currents that pass through them.
Memristors are a key ingredient in brain-inspired, energy-efficient computing systems, and finding sustainable ways to build them could revolutionize the tech industry.
“Mushrooms have special electrical and biological properties that make them great candidates for bioelectronics,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine.
“If we can develop microchips that mimic the way real brains work, they’ll use far less energy, especially when idle. That’s a huge advantage for both computing and the environment.”
The study, published in PLOS One, highlights how fungi could help solve one of technology’s biggest problems—electronic waste.
Conventional chips are made using rare, nonrenewable materials and require large amounts of power to manufacture and run.
By contrast, mushroom-based electronics are biodegradable, inexpensive, and energy-efficient.
“Mycelium, the underground root network of mushrooms, has already been explored as a computing material,” said LaRocco.
“But our work pushes this idea further by showing that mushrooms themselves can be turned into working memory devices.”
To test their potential, the team grew samples of shiitake and button mushrooms, dried them to make them last longer, and connected them to electronic circuits.
The mushrooms were then exposed to controlled electrical pulses at different voltages and frequencies.
By measuring how the mushrooms responded to these signals, researchers discovered that they could reliably switch between electrical states—just like a digital memory chip.
Different parts of each mushroom reacted differently to the electrical currents.
“We attached probes to different areas and found that each part of the mushroom had unique electrical behavior,” LaRocco explained. “That means they can be tuned or ‘programmed’ in various ways depending on how you wire them.”
When used as RAM—the short-term memory in computers—the fungal memristors were able to switch between electrical states up to 5,850 times per second with around 90% accuracy.
Performance dropped when the voltages became too high, but researchers found that connecting more mushrooms in a network could fix this issue, much like neurons in a brain.
“This research shows how surprisingly simple it is to prepare and train mushrooms to behave in useful electronic ways,” said co-author Qudsia Tahmina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. “It’s an exciting example of how we can draw inspiration from nature to make greener technology.”
The team believes fungal electronics could one day be scaled up for larger computing systems, such as those used in aerospace and edge computing, or miniaturized for use in wearable technology and small autonomous devices.
“Mushroom-based computing could be built with anything from a compost pile and some homemade electronics to an industrial-scale production line,” LaRocco said. “We already have the tools to explore it now. The challenge is just figuring out how far we can take it.”
If successful, these living chips could lead to a new era of sustainable, eco-friendly computers—powered not by silicon, but by nature itself.
