Washington, July 25 - Researchers have programmed a virulent microbe, the E. coli, to potentially solve complicated mathematics problems.

The researchers have found that computing in living cells is feasible, opening the door to a number of applications.

The second-generation bacterial computers illustrate the feasibility of extending the approach to other computationally challenging maths problems.

A research team comprising four faculty members and 15 biology and maths undergraduates from Missouri Western State University (MWSU) and Davidson College in North Carolina engineered the DNA of E. coli.

They were able to create bacterial computers capable of solving a classic mathematical problem known as the Hamiltonian Path Problem.

The Hamiltonian Path Problem asks whether there is a route in a network from a beginning node to an end node, visiting each node exactly once.