Learning without a brain – how bacteria store memories and remember the past like artificial neural networks

Researchers tracked tens of thousands of individual E. coli cells through fluctuating nutrient supplies and found that bacteria exposed to a feast-and-famine environment adapted faster to a sudden pulse of food than bacteria coming from stable conditions, even though the immediate environment was identical. The team built a mathematical model pointing to ribosomes, the cell's protein-building machinery, as the likely storage site for this memory, with some ribosomes responding fast and others slow, together spanning minutes to hours.

The researchers say this molecular system mirrors the logic of a gated recurrent neural network, an AI architecture that decides how much old information to keep versus overwrite. They suggest the finding could eventually inform drugs that disrupt how pathogenic bacteria store and use memory of their environment inside the body.

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