Alan Turing organize his famous “ Turing Test ” in 1950 to see if a machine could trick a individual into thinking it was human . While it ’s yet to be beaten by a machine , scientists have just done the biological equivalent – creating artificial cubicle that play a joke on bacteria into thinking they were alive .
The research , published inACS Central Science , was led by Sheref S. Mansy of the University of Trento in Italy . They constructed nanoscale lipid vessels , and culture them with bacteria – specificallyVibrio fischeri , Pseudomonas aeruginosa , andE. coli .
When they did this , they found that the hokey cells show sure cistron in response to the bacteria . In other words , they were chemically communicating by glowing and let go chemical signal to reply , with the bacterium thinking they were talking to real cells . Thus , it might be possible to one day make artificial cells that can interact with the human body .
" We felt that we were well positioned to put together artificial cell that could engage in two - way chemical substance communicating with bacterium , i.e. artificial cells that could be used in a cellular version of a Turing Test , " Mansy toldResearchGate . " We also see that the cellular Turing Test could be used to quantify how life - like the hokey jail cell are . "
The researchers establish that their artificial cellphone were able-bodied to sense the corpuscle that the bacterium naturally secreted , and respond in a sprightliness - like manner . They ’re trust to next build dissimilar variety of artificial mobile phone , and practice the same trial run with bacterium to test out how life - like they are .
There were limitations , however , namely that only one of the bacteria species was able to engage in a “ full cycle of take heed and speaking ” with the unreal cellphone , according to theAmerican Chemical Society(ACS ) .
But it ’s certainly promising , not least for the prospect of unreal cell being used one 24-hour interval in a range of functions . The first semisynthetic cells were only madeback in 2010 , so it ’s been a good leap forwards since then .
