[div class=attrib]From Smithsonian:[end-div]

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a prediction about computing that has held true to this day. Moore’s law, as it came to be known, forecasted that the number of transistors we’d be able to cram onto a circuit—and thereby, the effective processing speed of our computers—would double roughly every two years. Remarkably enough, this rule has been accurate for nearly 50 years, but most experts now predict that this growth will slow by the end of the decade.

Someday, though, a radical new approach to creating silicon semiconductors might enable this rate to continue—and could even accelerate it. As detailed in a study published in this month’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara and elsewhere have harnessed the process of evolution to produce enzymes that create novel semiconductor structures.

“It’s like natural selection, but here, it’s artificial selection,” Daniel Morse, professor emeritus at UCSB and a co-author of the study, said in an interview. After taking an enzyme found in marine sponges and mutating it into many various forms, “we’ve selected the one in a million mutant DNAs capable of making a semiconductor.”

In an earlier study, Morse and other members of the research team had discovered silicatein—a natural enzyme used used by marine sponges to construct their silica skeletons. The mineral, as it happens, also serves as the building block of semiconductor computer chips. “We then asked the question—could we genetically engineer the structure of the enzyme to make it possible to produce other minerals and semiconductors not normally produced by living organisms?” Morse said.

To make this possible, the researchers isolated and made many copies of the part of the sponge’s DNA that codes for silicatein, then intentionally introduced millions of different mutations in the DNA. By chance, some of these would likely lead to mutant forms of silicatein that would produce different semiconductors, rather than silica—a process that mirrors natural selection, albeit on a much shorter time scale, and directed by human choice rather than survival of the fittest.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]