Programmable neural computation
We engineer neuronal and glial cultures that perform Boolean logic operations in vitro (in the lab, outside the body). Using tripartite synapses — junctions where an astrocyte modulates the connection between two neurons — we have demonstrated AND, OR, and NOT gates with spike-pattern diversity sufficient for sequential biocomputation (Basso & Barros, Npj Unconventional Computing, 2026; IEEE T-NB, 2023). Calcium signalling in astrocytes provides the programmable nonlinearity: by tuning intracellular Ca²⁺ dynamics, we set the logical threshold of each gate (Barros et al., Scientific Reports, 2021). Current work focuses on scaling these gates into multi-layer circuits and benchmarking their reliability against equivalent silicon logic.
