Neural coding of temperature with a DNA-based spiking chemical neuron

Complex organisms perceive their surroundings with sensory neurons which encode physical stimuli into spikes of electrical activities. In the past decade, DNA-based chemical neurons that mimic neuronal information processing have been reported. Yet, they lack the physical sensing and temporal coding of sensory biological neurons. Here we report a thermosensory chemical neuron that spikes when exposed to cold. Surprisingly, the chemical neuron shares deep mathematical similarities with a toy model of a cold nociceptive neuron: they follow a similar bifurcation route between rest and oscillations and avoid artefacts associated with canonical bifurcations (such as irreversibility, damping or untimely spiking). We demonstrate this robustness by digitally or analogically encoding thermal messages into chemical waveforms. This chemical neuron could pave the way for implementing in DNA the third generation of neural network models (spiking networks), and opens the door for associative learning. One-Sentence Summary A DNA-based chemical network mathematically mimics the sensing of cold by a biological neuron.