Living organisms have unique capabilities such as self-healing, adaptation to the environment, homeostasis, and converting chemical energy into motion, growth and division. Introducing aspects of autonomous function through sensing of the environment, monitoring the internal state, and regulating behaviour into synthetic life-inspired systems, represents a truly disruptive development, as it challenges our notion of what differentiates living systems from synthetic, man-made devices. However, despite substantial research efforts, a general platform for the construction of such systems remains a highly desired but elusive goal. How do we construct functional systems and devices out of molecules? How do we fuel these systems? How do we replace electronic circuits with networks of chemical reactions?
The ultimate aim of this proposal is to construct life-inspired complex molecular systems based on the design blueprints of living matter. Achieving this aim would yield life-like materials with embedded computing power that have the ability to sense their environment, to compute information from the environment, and to learn and adapt their shape and function. Such materials might become a radically new interface between electronic and living systems.
This project has been very successful - in an unexpected way. Instead of a systematic, bottom-up approach to networks of increasing complexity, we discovered that self-organizing chemical reaction networks have so-called reservoir computation capabilities. We demonstrated that both the formose reaction as well as a novel type of enzymatic networks based on molecular competition can outperform in silico machine learning algorithms on complex tasks such as non-linear classification and time-series prediction. Furthermore, as computation is done in the chemical domain we could demonstrate that such systems can act as reservoir sensors, that classify the chemical characteristics of their environment. We fully achieved our goal of establishing a blueprint for smart materials that can interact with both electronic and living systems.
