The electronics industry produces over 62 million metric tons of e-waste annually, circuit boards, processors, and memory chips that are energy-intensive to manufacture, nearly impossible to recycle, and destined for landfills after just a few years of service. Meanwhile, the global push toward AI is driving data center power consumption to unprecedented levels, with cooling alone accounting for up to 40% of a facility’s energy use.
But an unlikely solution is emerging from beneath the forest floor. Researchers across multiple continents are now demonstrating that fungal mycelium, the thread-like underground network of mushrooms, can be transformed into biodegradable circuit boards, living memory components, and self-healing electronic sensors. The field, increasingly referred to as “fungal electronics” or “mycoelectronics,” could fundamentally reshape how we build, power, and dispose of computing hardware.
What Are Fungal Electronics?
Fungal electronics refers to the use of mycelium, the vegetative, root-like structure of fungi, as a functional material in electronic components. Unlike traditional electronics, which rely on mined metals, petroleum-based plastics, and energy-intensive fabrication, fungal electronics leverage a living organism that can be grown at room temperature, shaped into desired forms, and composted at the end of its life.
The concept builds on a surprising biological fact: mycelial networks naturally conduct electrical signals. Fungi use these bioelectrical impulses to communicate across their networks, coordinate nutrient transport, and respond to environmental changes. Scientists have now learned to harness and direct this electrical activity for computing purposes, turning what is essentially a mushroom’s nervous system into functional electronic hardware.
“Everything you’d need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics,” said John LaRocco, lead author of a landmark 2025 study on fungal memristors at Ohio State University.
The field now spans five distinct but interconnected research frontiers: biodegradable circuit board substrates, fungal memory devices (memristors), reservoir computing chips, self-healing thermal sensors, and fully compostable hardware systems. Together, they represent one of the most unconventional, and potentially transformative, approaches to sustainable computing ever proposed.
How Fungi Conduct Electricity
To understand fungal electronics, it helps to start with the biology. Mycelium consists of microscopic filaments called hyphae that branch and fuse into complex, three-dimensional networks. These networks exhibit a property that surprised early researchers: they generate and propagate electrical signals in the form of action potential-like spikes, the same type of electrical impulses used by animal neurons.
Andrew Adamatzky, director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol, was among the first to demonstrate this phenomenon systematically. His lab, founded in 2001 on the belief that 21st-century computers would be made from “wetware”—chemical and living systems working alongside silicon—spent a decade studying slime mold computing before pivoting to fungi.
The electrical conductivity of mycelium arises from ion transport across cell membranes. When fungi are exposed to environmental stimuli—heat, moisture, pressure, or electrical current—their cells respond by opening and closing ion channels, creating measurable voltage changes. By attaching microelectrodes to mycelial networks, researchers can both read these signals and inject their own, effectively turning the fungus into a programmable electrical component.
Crucially, different fungal species exhibit different electrical properties. Shiitake (Lentinula edodes), oyster (Pleurotus djamor), ghost (Omphalotus nidiformis), and caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps militaris) have each been studied for distinct electronic behaviors, opening the door to a library of biological components tailored to specific computing tasks.
Mycelium Circuit Boards: The MycelioTronics Breakthrough
One of the most practical advances in fungal electronics comes from Johannes Kepler University in Austria, where a team led by researchers at the Institute for Experimental Physics developed MycelioTronics, a method for using fungal mycelium skins as biodegradable substrates for printed circuit boards (PCBs).
Published in Science Advances in 2022, the MycelioTronics approach grows mycelium into thin, flexible sheets that can be harvested, dried, and metalized using physical vapor deposition. Copper and gold are deposited onto the fungal surface, and circuit traces are carved using laser ablation, the same techniques used for conventional flexible electronics. The resulting “mycelium PCB” can be soldered, bent over 2,000 times before cracking, and folded repeatedly with only moderate increases in electrical resistance.
The thermal stability of the mycelium skin proved remarkable: it withstands soldering temperatures, enabling standard electronic components to be attached directly. In a striking demonstration, the Austrian team built a fully functional sensing device, complete with a mycelium-based battery, a humidity and proximity sensor, and a Bluetooth communication module, all on a biodegradable fungal substrate.
Even more recently, in July 2026, researchers at TU Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany unveiled AnimatPCB, a compostable circuit board made from Aspergillus niger mycelium, a waste product of industrial citric acid production. Published in Cleaner Materials, the study showed that these fungal boards have a density of 1.23 g/cm3, comparable to conventional PCBs, and a CO2 footprint up to 56% lower than standard glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy boards. The material also demonstrated good mechanical strength and heat stability and could be safely dissolved in water at end-of-life, allowing electronic components to be recovered and reused.
Fungal Memristors: Living Memory for Computers
Perhaps the most headline-grabbing development in the field is the fungal memristor. A memristor, short for “memory resistor,” is a type of electronic component that can remember its past electrical state, making it ideal for data storage and neuromorphic computing (systems that mimic the brain’s architecture).
Conventional memristors are typically made from metal oxides and require rare-earth minerals and high-temperature fabrication.
In October 2025, a team at Ohio State University published a study in PLOS ONE demonstrating that common edible fungi, specifically shiitake and button mushrooms, could be grown, dehydrated, and wired into circuits to function as organic memristors. When used as RAM, the mushroom memristor operated at up to 5,850 Hz with approximately 90% accuracy.
The preservation method proved critical. By dehydrating the mushrooms before use, the researchers created stable components that could be stored long-term without degradation. When electrocuted at various voltages and frequencies, the mycelial networks displayed reproducible memory effects comparable to semiconductor-based chips, but with none of the toxic manufacturing waste.
“Fungal electronics aren’t a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems,” LaRocco explained. “This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors.”
Notably, the shiitake-based devices exhibited radiation resistance, suggesting potential applications in aerospace and space electronics, environments where traditional electronics are vulnerable to damage from cosmic rays. The team also found that when performance degraded at higher frequencies, connecting multiple mushrooms to the circuit restored stability, behavior that closely mirrors how biological neural networks compensate for individual neuron noise.
Mycelium Chips That Think: Reservoir Computing
Beyond memory storage, researchers have shown that mycelium can perform actual computation. In August 2025, a team published a paper on bioRxiv introducing mycelium-based reservoir computing chips, a neuromorphic computing substrate that transforms input signals into complex, high-dimensional patterns suitable for machine learning tasks.
The chips are produced using a “design-grow-compute” workflow: fungal hyphae are grown under controlled environmental conditions that shape their morphology, then infused with PEDOT:PSS (a conductive polymer) through vacuum-assisted processing. The resulting material contains up to 16 spatially distinct reservoir regions on a single chip, each capable of processing information in parallel.
When benchmarked on tasks such as NARMA-10 sequence prediction, a standard test for reservoir computing systems, the mycelium chips demonstrated robust nonlinearity, temporal dynamics, and task-relevant separability. In other words, the fungal networks successfully transformed time-varying inputs into computational states that a simple readout layer could interpret.
What makes this approach particularly compelling from a sustainability standpoint is its scalability. The researchers noted that a single growth cycle using existing mushroom farming infrastructure could yield over 3 million chips. Unlike silicon fabs, which require billion-dollar facilities and extreme temperatures, mycelium chips can be grown at ambient conditions and are fully compostable after use.
A related architecture, Memristive Oscillating Cellular Automata (MOCA), was presented at the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. MOCA uses silicon nitride-based resistive RAM (RRAM) arranged in a grid inspired by mycelial network dynamics, demonstrating that even when the physical fungus is replaced by conventional materials, nature’s networking strategies can still improve computing architecture.
Self-Healing Thermal Sensors: The Mycoelectronics Frontier
Perhaps the most futuristic application comes from a 2025 study introducing Mycoelectronics, bioprinted living fungal networks integrated directly onto stretchable electronics to create thermal sensors with intrinsic self-healing capabilities.
The research, published on bioRxiv, demonstrated that when living mycelium is bioprinted onto flexible electronic substrates, the resulting hybrid device can sense temperature changes with rapid response times. The mechanism is strikingly elegant: heat triggers vacuole remodeling and fusion within fungal cells, which modulates ionic transport and consequently changes the electrical conductivity of the mycelial network. The fungus essentially becomes the sensor.
What sets this apart from conventional thermal sensors is the self-healing property. When the mycelium network is physically damaged, cut, punctured, or degraded, the living organism naturally regenerates, restoring electrical connectivity and sensing function autonomously. The researchers also demonstrated that fungal sensors could establish new sensing pathways into hard-to-reach locations through natural growth, something no synthetic sensor can replicate.
The team went further by integrating the fungal thermal sensor with electronic circuits to create a “hybrid bioelectronic reflex arc,” a system where the fungus detects heat and triggers an external actuator, such as a muscle-like material. The implications for robotics, prosthetics, and environmental monitoring are significant, but the thermal management potential for computing hardware is particularly intriguing. A server rack lined with living mycelial sensors could theoretically detect and respond to heat hotspots before electronic systems even register a fault.
The End of E-Waste: Compostable Hardware
The environmental case for fungal electronics is powerful. With e-waste from conventional hardware piling up globally, biodegradable alternatives offer a fundamentally different path forward. The substrate, the base material of a circuit board, accounts for approximately 37% of e-waste by weight. Conventional PCBs use glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy (FR4), a material that is essentially impossible to recycle and persists in landfills for centuries.
Fungal alternatives flip this equation entirely. The AnimatPCB board from TU Freiberg dissolves safely in water at the end-of-life, allowing valuable components like transistors and microchips to be recovered and reused. The remaining mycelium substrate can be composted, biodegrading into harmless organic matter. In laboratory composting tests, the MycelioTronics team found that their fungal skins lost 93.4% of their dry mass within just 11 days, after which the remnants were indistinguishable from soil.
The circular economy benefits extend beyond disposal. The Freiberg researchers specifically sourced their mycelium from industrial citric acid production waste, converting a valueless byproduct into a functional engineering material without additional fossil-based inputs. The entire production cycle—growth, processing, use, and disposal—operates within a closed-loop system that traditional electronics manufacturing cannot match.
This approach also addresses the growing problem of conflict minerals and supply chain vulnerabilities in electronics manufacturing. Rather than mining rare earth elements from geopolitically sensitive regions, fungal electronics can be grown locally using agricultural or industrial byproducts. As the reservoir computing chip researchers demonstrated, production can piggyback on existing mushroom farming infrastructure; no new factories required.
Challenges and Realistic Outlook
For all their promise, fungal electronics face significant hurdles before they can challenge silicon in mainstream applications. Speed is the most obvious limitation: the shiitake memristor’s 5.85 kHz switching rate is roughly one-millionth the speed of a modern microprocessor operating at gigahertz frequencies. Fungal electronics will not replace CPUs anytime soon.
Instead, researchers envision fungal components occupying complementary niches: low-speed, low-power applications where sustainability and biodegradability matter more than raw performance. Environmental sensors, educational electronics, disposable medical devices, IoT nodes, and edge computing in remote locations are all plausible near-term targets.
Durability and standardization also present challenges. Biological materials vary from batch to batch, and consistent electrical performance across different growth cycles remains difficult to guarantee. Temperature and humidity constraints may limit operating environments, and the long-term stability of dehydrated mycelium over years rather than months has yet to be demonstrated.
Still, progress is accelerating. The span from the foundational “Towards fungal computer” paper in 2018 to the AnimatPCB prototype in 2026 represents just eight years, a remarkably short time for a field that begins with growing mushrooms in a petri dish and ends with functional electronic devices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a mushroom really be a computer?
Not in the traditional sense; you won’t run a web browser on a portobello. But fungal mycelium can perform specific computing functions, including memory storage (as a memristor), signal processing (as a reservoir computing chip), and sensing (as a thermal detector). Researchers have demonstrated basic logic circuits and electronic components made from fungi, and the field is progressing toward more complex integrated systems.
Can mycelium conduct electricity?
Yes. Mycelial networks propagate electrical signals through ion transport across cell membranes, generating action potential-like spikes similar to those in animal neurons. While mycelium is not as conductive as copper wire, its electrical properties can be harnessed and directed for specific electronic functions, particularly when metalized or infused with conductive polymers.
Is the mycelium network real?
The “mycelium network” is both a biological reality and a useful metaphor. Underground, fungal mycelia form vast interconnected webs, sometimes called the “Wood Wide Web,” that connect trees and plants, facilitating nutrient exchange and chemical communication. In the context of electronics, researchers create artificial mycelial networks in controlled laboratory conditions, growing them into specific shapes and configurations for electronic use.
What fungi produce electricity?
Several species have demonstrated measurable electrical activity in laboratory settings. Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) and button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) have been used as memristors. Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus djamor), ghost fungus (Omphalotus nidiformis), bracket fungus (Ganoderma resinaceum), enoki (Flammulina velutipes), and caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps militaris) have all been studied for their distinct electrical signaling properties. The fungi do not “produce” electricity in the way a battery does, but rather modulate and conduct electrical signals through their cellular networks.
What does mycelium do to humans?
Mycelium is generally harmless to humans and has been consumed for centuries in the form of mushrooms. In the context of electronics, the mycelium used is typically dehydrated or otherwise treated, making it biologically inert. Some species, like Aspergillus niger (used in the AnimatPCB), can cause respiratory issues if large quantities of spores are inhaled, but the processed mycelium material poses no such risk. Standard laboratory safety protocols apply during the growth phase.
The Road Ahead
Fungal electronics sits at a fascinating inflection point. What began as the eccentric pursuit of a single unconventional computing lab in Bristol has blossomed into a multi-continental research effort spanning materials science, electrical engineering, mycology, and computer science. The breakthroughs are no longer theoretical; they are published, peer-reviewed, and reproducible.
The next chapter will likely involve moving beyond individual components toward integrated systems: a fully fungal circuit board with mycelium-based memory, sensing, and perhaps even processing, all on a single compostable substrate. Teams in Austria, Germany, the United States, and the UK are each advancing pieces of this puzzle, and the first commercial applications, likely in environmental sensing or educational electronics, may be closer than the field’s unconventional origins would suggest.
None of this means that Silicon’s reign is ending. Fungal electronics will not replace the microprocessors in our phones and laptops. But they may well replace the circuit boards those processors sit on, the sensors that monitor their temperature, and the disposable electronics that currently clog our landfills. In a world grappling with the environmental costs of digital expansion, a technology that can be grown instead of mined and composted instead of dumped deserves serious attention.
Nature spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting the mycelial network, an adaptive, self-healing, energy-efficient information system that covers much of the Earth’s surface. It may turn out to be the blueprint computing has been waiting for.
