Scientists are always on the lookout for ways to marry technology with nature. It seems they may have just struck a nerve—by creating an actual nerve.
on Tuesday, researchers from three Swedish universities constructed the neurons from polymers that can transport electrical signals to cells in the Venus flytrap that control the carnivorous plant’s mouth.
While Venus flytraps and other plants don’t have nerves like humans and other animals, they are able to generate electrical impulses called action potentials that our own neurons use to convey information to neural neighbors in the brain and spinal cord. Aside from controlling a Venus flytrap’s snap, the artificial neuron also showed it was capable of Hebbian learning, a widely accepted theory in neuroscience that information in a neural network is stored between neurons in the form of weights. Greater stimulation leads to greater changes in weight , resulting in stronger or weaker neural connections.
While these synthetic cells are quick, they aren’t quick enough. Fabiano said the frequency at which these neurons operate is on par with human sympathetic neurons . Ideally, the team would like them to be faster, mimicking the frequency of the human neocortex, the part of the human brain thought to be responsible for thought, attention, perception and episodic memory.
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