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John Roach

Itsy-bitsy, super-speedy computers of the future may be grown with bacteria, according to researchers whove already harnessed a magnet-making microbe to start building hard-drive components.

The little living factories maycome in handy as the computer industry races to build smaller and smaller components at the nanoscale for supercomputers the size of a pinhead.

Weve already seen a hard drive that stores a bit of data with just 12 atoms and a four-atom-wide wire that could get information in and out of quantum bits in tomorrows quantum computers.

Researchers at the United Kingdoms University of Leeds and Japans Tokyo University of Technology have focused their attention on an aquatic microbe that eats iron to create tiny magnets.

Magnetospirillum magneticum swim following Earths magnetic field, a trick they are able to do because of an iron diet. When they eat iron, proteins inside their bodies interact with it to produce tiny crystals of the mineral magnetite, the BBC explains.

The research team replicated the behavior going on inside the bacteria on the outside of the cell wall, making the magnetic material available for hard drives, according the University of Leeds. More details are provided in university press release:

In a process akin to potato-printing on a much smaller scale, this protein is attached to a gold surface in a checkerboard pattern and placed in a solution containing iron.

At a temperature of 80C, similarly-sized crystals of magnetite form on the sections of the surface covered by the protein.The team are now working to reduce the size of these islands of magnets, in order to make arrays of single nanomagnets. They also plan to vary the magnetic materials that this protein can control.

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Magnetic bacteria may help build computer hard drives