The amount of the Advanced Grant may vary, but it is about €2.5 million that can be used by the recipients to continue their research for the next five years. A total of €838 million in grants will be allocated to 319 researchers across Europe in this round.
MolCompute: Reservoir computing in living and synthetic enzymatic reaction networks
Living systems are evidently able to process complex information in their environment. There has been tremendous interest in constructing synthetic molecular systems that imitate the computational capabilities of living systems. Significant process has been made in the bottom-up construction of small network motifs that can act as logic gates or Boolean circuits, perform analog
computation, or show behaviour such as adaptation, motion, or homeostasis. However, significant breakthroughs are required for chemical computing to fully exploit the inherent dynamics and non-linearities associated with chemical reactions. Our recent discovery of chemical reservoir computing has opened up the possibility of a general molecular computing platform that rivals living systems in terms of information processing capabilities. In this proposal, I will address key bottlenecks in training and scaling of molecular information processing systems that are required for the development of a super-critical scale up of computational capabilities. I will also demonstrate that living systems themselves could be the ultimate chemical computing system, and that we can adapt the training and scaling methodologies developed for synthetic systems to harness cellular reservoir computation.