Running 'Doom' on E. coli cells slowly

3 hours ago

Doom, released over 30 years ago, is a seminal first-person shooter that inspired creative coding projects since its source code became freely available in 1997.
Hobbyists have hacked various devices like pregnancy tests, tractors, ATMs, and calculators to run Doom, pushing the limits of what can host the game.
MIT biotechnology researcher Lauren "Ren" Ramlan engineered E. coli cells to function as a display screen for Doom, using them as pixels that glow when illuminated.
The bacterial display works by growing cells in a 32×48 grid and controlling their fluorescence with a repressor system, translating binary code into light patterns.
Despite being functional, the E. coli screen is extremely slow, taking about 70 minutes to illuminate a single frame and over 8 hours to dim, resulting in an estimated 599 years to play the entire game.

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