LIVE bacteria could one day act as reconfigurable components for nanoscale electronic circuits, or even a scaffold for building nanomachines.
“Nature has developed these fantastic building blocks,” says Robert Hamers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Our approach is to simply grab onto them very gently.” His team have been using electrodes to manipulate individual bacterial cells, they will report in a future issue of Nano Letters.
Their chosen bacterium was Bacillus mycoide, 5 micrometres long and 0.8 wide – large enough to be visible under an optical microscope. The trick is to apply an electric field to the microbes, so…
