Nanotubes

Nanotubes

Just as people, bacterium need to communicate with others, for this purpose there are many ways, and one of the more recent discovery are Nanotubes that bridge neighboring cells, providing a network for exchange of cellular molecules within and between species. Ben-Yehuda et al discovered these nanotubes in 2011, they show and extraordinary form of communication between Bacillus subtilis. Our team was astonished because of the implications, in the article is described that GFP and calcein, two molecules which cannot leave the cytoplasm, can be transferred to neighboring cells in B. subtillis, it means bacterium can share cytoplasm, the complex network of cells sharing cytoplasm that can be created was our main motivation to create Bacillus booleanus.

It's still little known about nanotubes, and that's make them a very interesting subject of study, and we are not the first iGEM team interested in working with them, in 2011 Paris_Bettencourt team work with the nanotubes, their goal was to characterize them.

To accomplish our goal of communicate our logic gates, we contacted Ben Yehuda group, and Paris Bettencourt iGEM 2011 team, to obtain protocols and work experience.

We work to recreate the formation of nanotubes, and we did it!

We prepare our cells with the SEM Analysis Protocol, We fixed our cells in the right moment (6 hrs of growth at 37°C), that is when they are in the exponential growth phase, and then we watch them in the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) and we get different and amazing pictures.

We got similar results to the article, tube length ranged from 0.25 micrometers to 0.9 micrometers, whereas width ranged approximately from 50 to 80 nm.



We also got an amazing picture about the nanotubes in which we can see, that there are many nanotubes among the cells, and that they communicate between different nanotubes to the same cell, observing this amount of nanotubes, we could think that the probability of transfer will raise.

Please see our wetlab notebook in the clicking the following image:

OR gate Notebook