Recently published research papers shed a lot of new light on the role of bacteria in human life, in the very beginning and at the cutting edge of modern bioengineering.
We’ve been over the “bad” and the “ugly.” So is there anything “good” about bacteria?
Indeed, there is. In fact, it may be the very stuff of life itself.
Not only that — and obviously, that’s a pretty big deal — but we may be on the verge of being able to control bacteria via electronics and make them work for us inside sick humans.
We should probably come to vigilance against “superbugs,” antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and the sloppy practices that put millions — perhaps even billions — of lives in jeopardy.
Free Reports:
At the same time, the world of single-cell microorganisms is complex and nuanced — bad and ugly but good as well…like life itself.
| We’ve been over the “bad” and the “ugly.” So is there anything “good” about bacteria? |
In a paper published January 13, 2017, in the journal Science, a team of researchers “observed the assembly of a nucleus-like structure in bacteria during viral infection.”
What that means, as Sarah Maddocks, a lecturer in microbiology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, explains for The Conversation, is this:
When a virus infects a living cell, it hijacks and reprograms the cell to turn it into a virus-producing factory. Now scientists at the University of California have for the first time discovered just how extensive that reprogramming can be, effectively turning bacterial cells into animal or plant-like cells. This might even be how the cells of more complex organisms evolved in the first place.
…
They discovered that the different viral proteins assembled inside the bacterial cell into functional machinery that looked and behaved a lot like the nucleus of a human cell. This nucleus-like structure was positioned at the center of the cell by long, tube-like protein fibres, just like the proteins responsible for positioning a human-cell nucleus.
So a virus did what it does today to all of us at one time or another, in forms as simple as the common cold and as confounding as the superbug that recently killed a woman in Nevada: It invaded a host cell and took control of the situation.
The critical act in this invasion is the creation of “a compartment that separated viral DNA from the cytoplasm” to allow replication. This “is a key feature of the cell nucleus.”
So single-cell microorganisms — or prokaryotes, or bacteria — “evolve” into higher-life-form multicellular organisms containing nuclei.
“The results of this study,” writes Maddocks, “could be pivotal for understanding how life evolved from relatively simple organisms into the complex and diverse life-forms that inhabit our planet today.”
That’s our beginning.
Here’s how far we’ve come, according to a paper published January 17, 2017, in the journal Nature Communications:
The ability to interconvert information between electronic and ionic modalities has transformed our ability to record and actuate biological function. Synthetic biology offers the potential to expand communication “bandwidth” by using biomolecules and providing electrochemical access to redox-based cell signals and behaviors. While engineered cells have transmitted molecular information to electronic devices, the potential for bidirectional communication stands largely untapped. Here we present a simple electrogenetic device that uses redox biomolecules to carry electronic information to engineered bacterial cells in order to control transcription from a simple synthetic gene circuit.
This, in short, describes how we’ll “connect engineered organisms to electronics, so we can make living components for devices,” as Sam Wong explains for New Scientist.
The research team, led by William Bentley, an engineer and founding director of the Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, showed that “bacteria can be engineered” using electrical input in a way that will allow us to “switch on any genes researchers want to target.”
| “The results of this study,” writes Maddocks, “could be pivotal for understanding how life evolved from relatively simple organisms into the complex and diverse life-forms that inhabit our planet today.” |
“One application,” writes Wong, “could be in biosensors using engineered bacteria that detect certain chemicals. For example, bacteria could be programmed to identify a particular infection and respond by fluorescing.”
Bacteria are everything, Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, and Eli Wallach all wrapped up on one fascinating package: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Smart Investing,
David Dittman
Editorial Director, Wall Street Daily
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