Experts prove that bacteria have memory that resembles human memory

Researchers from the American University of California have successfully demonstrated that bacteria possess a human-like memory by documenting their ability to remember in the same way.

During the study, published in the last issue of the journal "Cell Systems" this week, researchers used light to print a "memory" on a bacterial biosphere, and they discovered that bacteria acted amazingly similar to what happens in humans.

The human memory mechanism depends on the release of nerve cells in our brains upon exposure to the excitement of what we want to remember. A difference in the electrical charge between inside and outside the cell.

Almost all organisms use this phenomenon to power energy mechanisms in the cell membrane and transmit signals between different areas of the body, and in neurons, it is known that this mechanism is responsible for creating memory, and the surprise that researchers found is that something similar can happen in the biological membranes of bacteria .

And the research team proved this by exposing a simple bacterial species called "grass stick" to the blue light from the laser for five seconds, and they found that this light causes a change in the capabilities of the bacterial membrane, where ions flow continuously from the cell, then return again, and this effect remained It was stuck for several hours after exposure to light, where researchers re-exposed it to light, which consistently showed different membranous properties, compared to a control group of bacteria they were not exposed to, and therefore concluded that these bacteria "remember" their exposure to light.

"Our work shows for the first time that simple bacteria can encode memory at the level of their potential for the cellular membrane, which is similar to the memory process for neurons in the study," San Diego Gorol Sol, the University of California molecular biologist and lead study researcher, told yesterday, "Science Alert". the brain". "We were surprised to find that the mechanism by which memory is formed is similar between bacteria and neurons," he says.