Editorial: Towards the embedding of artificial intelligence into synthetic organisms: engineering intelligence in microorganisms

The main goal of this Research Topic was to gather and foster work that describes the design and/or implementation of AI within microorganisms, enabling them to use data in their environment to make autonomous decisions on a basic level. The technology for implementing such mechanisms lies within synthetic biology. Implementations of the mentioned AI methods should also be understood as “biological versions” of the computational algorithms, implying that living components and processes are made part of those versions of the algorithms, harnessing the intrinsic operation and processing power of microorganisms.