Listening to Bacteria’s ‘Music’ Could Help Us Combat Antibiotic Resistance
There’s a symphony of music being played on your skin by the most unlikely of musicians: bacteria. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have found out that bacteria make sound, and they’ve developed a method of listening to these tunes as they're made in real time. The new findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could be pivotal in determining an whether a species of bacteria is resistant or susceptible to antibiotics, a serious public health concern given that more that antibiotic resistance leads to more than 2.8 million bacterial infections and over 35,000 deaths each year in the U.S.
The researchers used graphene, a very thin material made of a single layer of carbon atoms, to pick up a bacterium’s subtle sounds. When strains of E. coli were placed on a microscopic drum covered in graphene, the vibrations from the bacteria’s tails—called flagella that work like a boat’s propeller and rudder—beat against it causing a very, very soft sound.
“What we saw was striking! When a single bacterium adheres to the surface of a graphene drum, it generates random oscillations with amplitudes as low as a few nanometers that we could detect,” Cees Dekker, a physicist at Delft University of Technology and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “We could hear the sound of a single bacterium!”
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