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Biotech Science

Microbes That Produce Miniature Electrical Wires 111

Posted by samzenpus from the nano-doozers dept.
anukit writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive. This breakthrough helps describe how microorganisms can clean up groundwater and produce electricity from renewable resources. It may also have applications in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which develops advanced materials and devices in extremely small dimensions."
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Microbes That Produce Miniature Electrical Wires More

Microbes That Produce Miniature Electrical Wires

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  • Possible cyberjack material? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @10:51PM (#12886662)


    Interesting read...the first thing that came to my mind when I read this is that these organic wires may be just the thing for the interface between electronics and organic tisue. One of the major problems in cybernetics is that the chemistry of the implants tends to be poisonous to the surrounding tissue, while the chemistry of the surrounding tisue tends to be corrosive to the implant. Over time, the interface degrades and must eventually be replaced. Microbial nanowires may eliminate this problem and pave the way for permanent interfaces sooner than we thought.

    • interesting thought, It really does have the opportunity to change the way we think of technology. Seriously think of all the things you could do with it. My first thought was cpu's of course, but then reading the 1st post, i realized how much this has a potentional to change life. I will read the article now.
    • Why only connect? Couldn't these be used to make actual muscles and organs that respond to electric signals from the brain?
    • Does this mean we'll be able to get wikipedia on an implant? Wait, would just anyone be able to edit it? ^o^
    • Good call, TMM, but I think that for optimum results, youd need to grow the organic tissue with this kinda stuff. Unless you can modify the system to incorporate the new design (adding other wires of whatever sort), it's gonna be a hack -- and I mean a real hack, with drilling, or surgery. Ick!

      Kudos to the crew at Amherst, stuff like this (indirectly) helps get us off this crazy rock. I partied at Amherst once, this neat grrrl made me a smartdrink, and told me about mobile PA-type systems.

      • Re:Fusion People (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MoralHazard ( 447833 )
        If the idea is the build in interface to neurons in the brain, why would you need to grow something organic? Chip implants that extend inorganic electrodes into the brain are already a reality, and they seem to work fine for research (I'm too lazy to look up the reference on that quadripelegic dude who got one, recently).

        Referring the that story, I recall that there were two big practical problems with the chip implant: 1) you have to drill a hole in the skull in order to make contact, and 2) the electro
    • Yeah, microbial nanowires must be the solution, because it's not like the human body has a thing for attacking foriegn cells, especially bacteria, right? Sorry to be sarcastic, but this doesnt seem to me to get anybody any closer to solving that particular problem. Better progress would probably be had in researching truly biologically-neutral conductors than in a elaborate scheme to get microbial nanowires to evade the human immune system. Besides, it doesn't even seem to be known that the conductive st
      • Yeah, microbial nanowires must be the solution, because it's not like the human body has a thing for attacking foriegn cells, especially bacteria, right?
        Youre assuming that you would need to inject the bacteria into the body which may or may not be the case since nowadays genes can easily be expressed outside the host organism.
      • I agree with your post entirely, but if there is any place where irrational exuberance about new technology should be greeted with optimism, it's Slashdot!

        These guys could be really happy in our mouths...

        Do you know what causes toothaches? Cavities allow bacteria to infect the soft tissue inside the tooth causing swelling and pus to build up. The toothache is caused by the pressure buildup on the nerves. I've been told by dentists, that our immune systems are incapable of fighting off bacterial gum infect

    • Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Shihar ( 153932 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @08:35AM (#12888166)
      Personally, I would look to single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) for what you describe. The real problem we have is that the body has a nasty habit of rejecting anything that isn't made by our own body. I have a feeling that these organically made wires will be no mored loved then the old fashion kind. The issue isn't organic vs inorganic, it is whether or not the body identifies the wires as not being apart of itself. We have evolved for millions of years to whack bacteria that isn't our own, so I wouldn't but the chances high that our bodies will be terribly receptive (though I would be pleased to be wrong).

      There have been some mixed signals as to weather or not nanotubes are carcinogens.
      The latest studies show that SWCNTs to be non-toxic and easily dealt with by the body. It isn't a green light, but it is hopeful. The real magic behind nanotubes is two fold. First, they are really small. Cells are giants compared to nanotubes. Second, nanotubes can be functionalized relatively easily, which is to say you can attach things to the surface of the nanotubes. When people talk about using nanotubes, they rarely mean those nifty little carbon chains that we all know at love. Generally, functional nanotubes have something else on the surface to specialize its purpose. For biological purposes, this means that what you see isn't necessarily what you have to work with. If these bacteria made nanowires turn out to be rejected by the human body, you are out of luck and the work stops there. With SWCNTs though, it just means you need to alter what type of molecules are hanging off of the carbon chain until you find some that the body won't attack and that don't disrupt the properties of the nanotube too bad.

      Simply put... single walled carbon nanotubes are the shit, err, and the future.

  • Wow. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @10:53PM (#12886676) Homepage Journal
    I never really considered the idea that germs could eat food and use it to shit wires.

  • Possible applications in biological computing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 5plicer ( 886415 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @10:57PM (#12886696)
    What if, through genetic engineering, we created neurones with these conductive pili?
    • Hey! That's a great idea! We could connect them all into this really big neural network that would make a great executive manager of a bunch of processes....Wow, that's amazing clever! Has anyone out there seen a working example of the design pattern?!? ...oh really...a brain, you say? How..how..analog..

      (ps...it's humor)

  • Like super-algae (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @11:04PM (#12886725) Journal
    More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.

    Obviously it would need to be non-toxic to existing wildlife and ideally it would be able to compress and become coal or oil for future generations, but the main goal would be to clean up our messes.

    With small amounts of electrical wiring as byproducts of the "biological" process of the microbe, we may even be able to "harvest" our wiring needs in much the same way we harvest seaweed or shellfish today for consumption.

    This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.

    • Re:Like super-algae (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wow. It would be like the Hitchhiker's Guide where nothing is ever manufactured because the universe is so vast than anything you could possibly imagine probably grows somewhere.

    • Re:Like super-algae (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @11:32PM (#12886828)
      More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water
      Already happens. Even oil refineries have oil consuming microbes to deal with their waste water and runoff that contains the oil that gets spilt on site. A major spill will kill all the bugs, but small amounts are dealt with effectively. It's not genetic engineering in that case but simple breeding of the kind you would use to get a better brewers yeast (ie. seperate out the stuff that can handle higher concentations of alcohol or oil and breed it again).

      Other bacteria are capable of dealing with metals, even copper - lookup "acid mine drainage" and you should find a few things - bacteria which previously caused environmental problems (in simplified terms eat copper and excrete sulphuric acid - that's one mean organism!) can be used to solve others.

      There's lots of odd stuff in organicly produced materials. The strangest I've heard of in the feild of metals is dislocation free iron (very strong stuff) in snails teeth (microscopic spiky bits on their tongues are teeth) in Western Australia.

    • Re:Like super-algae (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BioCS.Nerd ( 847372 )

      You have some interesting ideas here I'd like to talk about for a moment.

      More than any nano-tech application (computer nanotech, that is), such a microbe that can be engineered to clean up waste water and then settle to the bottom of a lake and quietly die would be excellent in cleaning up many of our polluted lakes and streams.

      I'm really leery about something like this. In my experience, an extreme of anything is never a good thing. Perchance an overabundance of this bacteria have an effect that m

    • Re:Like super-algae (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A similar process was developed for removing radioactive waste from water. A type of bacteria acts like a room ionizer and removes the particles boyance. The radioactive material settles to the bottom of the tank and allowing it to be safely collected.

      Another possible option could be in removing heavy metals from the water not only for toxic polution reasons but to harvest metals. The best way to get industry to clean up after themselves is to give them a way to make it profitable. They don't want to throw
    • This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.

      Meanwhile, on Magrethea:
      "Pfft. Those earth creatures finally figured out how to get microbes to do some serious work for them. Amazing for a bunch of hairdressers and phone-cleaners. Oh well. Enough slashdot, back to designing fjords."
    • This is another amazing step in our God-granted dominion and stewardship of His Creation.

      God's project Life isn't open source.. Screw him :)

  • concrete about the pili themselves. It would be neet to know something about their molecular structure.

    Another thing about this article that hit me: genetic engineering really is going strong. I still think of it in some ways as a future technology. But their description of turning of the genes that result in the pili as well as the idea of manipulating those genes to produce pili with various characteristics really points out a high degree of sophistication in genetic engineering techniques.

  • Soylent Brown (Score:2, Funny)

    by unitron ( 5733 )
    "Geobacter was discovered by Lovley in 1987 at the muddy bottom of the Potomac River in Washington D.C...."

    So that's where they dump the body everytime they find (and have to quickly remove) an honest politician!

  • I predict (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by abulafia ( 7826 )
    that the S&M community will find a ton of interesting, uses. And also that everyone else will be distraught everytime Newsweek recycles the topic, and need to Do Something, with exceptions for watching what other people do.

    -I heart ubiquitous computing

  • I can't wait to replace my old Amiga, powered by wheel-running mice, with an amoeba-powered Nokia.

  • SPGA (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @11:56PM (#12886914) Homepage Journal
    I've read about some research into microwire-based sublithographic programmable gate arrays.

    This has some potential for the computer industry in the way of getting us closer to Moore's Law but also paves the way for increasing the amount of malleable logic in what was previously fixed silicon applications.

    Of course, nanowire is pretty expensive to produce. Or it used to be...

    • Why rely on the microbe to produce the nanowires at its pace and spec? The really interesting stuff is self-assembling (as in self-positioning, not tiny robots building other robots) nanoparticles. These guys [google.com] allowed coated gold nanoparticles to self-organize on a DNA scaffold... and it can be reproduced in <10 minutes. Watch out Moore's Law.

  • Old News (Score:3, Informative)

    by core plexus ( 599119 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @02:46AM (#12887394) Homepage
    Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets [alaska-freegold.com]

    "Bacterial biomineralization, as it's known among the experts, has been observed in other places and for other minerals. In fact, bacterial abilities to precipitate metals from solution have been used in some very high-tech contemporary methods of treating polluted water. It's even been appreciated that some bacteria can precipitate gold. Watterson himself had found that the spore coats of another bacterial breed serve as nuclei for luring gold out of solution in broths of gold chloride."

    -cp-

  • Why, the NERVE of those guys!

    (It had to be said 8^D)

  • The Field of Biomimicry (Score:3, Informative)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @06:21AM (#12887812) Homepage Journal
    While not explicitly linked to biomimicry [wikipedia.org], the implications relate to this relatively new field. There's now a web site [biomimicry.net] dedicated to dissiminating the developing ideas. My introduction came from reading Biomimicry [amazon.com] by Janine M. Benyus. I found a copy in the central library and I think most city libraries would have a copy. It's not a rigorous read and an easy one. As the fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology grow, implementations of biomimicry will provide avenues to harness nature according to it's own rules, or, so I hope. :)
  • Microbe "soup", easily refillable on pump stations, rich in electric energy, easily harvested ... at last, the final stone in the mosaic!

    And to regenerate the "fuel" (refill the "batteries"), just spill it back in central waste water tank of the pump station...
  • I'm imagining digging through the trash at airports to find bannana peels to recharge my laptop.

  • The length of these wires (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rpcxdr ( 796317 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @08:32AM (#12888154)
    The nanowires are incredibly fine, only 3-5 nanometers in width (20,000 times finer than a human hair), but quite durable and more than a thousand times long as they are wide.

    In other words, the length of these wires is 20 times finer than a human hair. They sure do work to make these numbers sound exciting!
  • "Geobacter have been used to [...] remove uranium from contaminated groundwater at a number of U.S. Department of Energy sites."

    Who wants to engineer some uranium-eating bacteria, to release into weapons facilities around the world? We'll probably need some bacteria-eating fruit flies, too, to rediffuse the hot stuff back into the crust. Genome hackers, start your engines!
  • "... nanotechnology, which develops advanced materials and devices in extremely small dimensions."

    Huh, so that's what that is!
  • So we'll have the trash powered hover car after a few years... FINALLY!!

  • So if we follow this "breakthrough" and use colonies of these "lower life forms" to generate electricity to fuel our power grids, exactly how we are different from the machines in the Matrix?
  • IANAA [I am not an anything] but it seems to me that the human body already comes with a programming language that has four unique identifiers aka DNA. I'm sure people are already exploring this but I have always seen similarities between how computers encode information {0,1 ad naseum} and the way that our bodies encodes information {Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine}.

    Personally, I do not think it's too far fetched to think that our DNA is just an elaborate programming language. Whether we're talki
    • Your intuition is right about DNA being digitally encoded information. There are several complications when it comes to reverse engineering it, though.

      The first is that the "computer" that reads the data is extremely complicated and self-modifying. We know a lot about how cells read DNA and enventually translate it into protiens, but there's still a lot that we don't know about the process. Until we understand exactly how the computer translates the code, it's really hard to both read existing code and t

  • "a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive"

    Or at least it feels that way when I see a nice picture of Angelina Jolie!
  • ... wire my daughter's doll house for Ethernet.
  • The Yuuzhan Vong are here!
  • I wonder what the heavy metal cleanup mechanism is, capillary electrophoresis? How could it be implemented in practice, by injection? Fascinating stuff.
  • Given the tiny size of the "wires" their resistance must be very low if they have the efficiency implied by the article. I wonder if we could bundle them together somehow to create macro-scale superconductor cables? If not, they might provide clues on how to create such a material on the macro-scale.

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