DOOM Is Now Playable on E. coli, Well Sort of

DOOM is an age old title that has served the sole purpose of proving that almost anything with a screen can run it including Calculators, ATMs, pregnancy tests, and… E. Coli?

DOOM On E. Coli

This is an odd one but as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, an MIT biotech student researcher Lauren Ramlan has managed to get DOOM running on the gut bacteria known as E. coli. They effectively created a 32×48 1-bit display made up on E. coli cells… they ran doom on a cell. Now the process of this involves using each individual cell as a pixel and then using a fluorescent protein to make them light up, now I barely passed biology so I won’t try to explain what is best seen in the video below.

This is all amazing for DOOM but there is one caveat, it only runs at 1 frame per 70 minutes. Though to be more accurate Each cell basically takes 70 minutes to illuminate and then another 8 hours and 20 minutes to return to the off state. Ramlan did some maths on this to figure out that in total this would mean that it would take 600 years to run the game.

How deep does the DOOM rabbithole go?