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Biotech Science

Bacteria Harnessed As Micro-Robot Motors 68

Posted by kdawson from the 15-microns-a-second dept.
ElectricBrian writes "Researchers have found a way to propel micro-capsules by attaching bacteria (S. marcescens, the type that makes your shower curtain moldy). Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University fixed the bacteria to the micro-capsules and then used chemicals to turn on and off their motion-producing flagella. Quoting: 'In the future, such hybrid swimming micro-robots could even be used to deliver drugs inside the liquid environments of the human body, such as the urinary tract, eyeball cavity, ear, and cerebrospinal fluid...'"
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Bacteria Harnessed As Micro-Robot Motors More

Bacteria Harnessed As Micro-Robot Motors

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  • they unionize. Then they'll lobby to get a monopoly on every drug-delivery job, and prices will skyrocket, and we'll have to call them "pharmaceutical delivery workers" instead of "bacteria".
  • Serious was there ever a better reason not to RTFA?
  • no one will ever go up MY urinary tract. no sir.
    • When I was a kid, my friend once told me that he tried to put the top end of a Bic pen into his urinary tract to stop him from having to pee. He is now an engineer. When I laughed and said that I was going to tell everyone, he told me that he knew I was jacking off (all the time) so I dropped the subject immediately. I know that this adds nothing to the discussion, but it is Saturday night and I am at home reading Slashdot.!
      • TMI. Although..your username is UR...ANUS.
        PS guys jack off "all the time" so how is that ammunition against YOU?

        case in point...
        Andy Stitzer: [motioning to David's box of porn] I don't want this stuff, okay? Because I don't do that, that much.
        David: What, masturbate?
        Andy Stitzer: Yeah.
        David: Dude, I've jacked it twice since I've been here. Are you kidding me? Why not?
        Andy Stitzer: It's not a hobby of mine.
        David: Well, then, that's the only hobby you don't have.
    • no one will ever go up MY urinary tract. no sir.

      Well, just make sure you stay out of the Amazon [straightdope.com], and you should be ok.
      • Thank you. I have now lost my apetite for the next year or so. And how did you come upon a story like that anyway?

  • Mold in the eye of the beholder... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @08:37PM (#17787042)
    Deliver drugs to the inside of the eye using mold? They don't think there would be a minor complication with getting rid of the mold afterwards?
    • Now we know what's with the Mold in God's Eye!

    • Its covered (Score:3, Funny)

      by KKlaus ( 1012919 )
      Don't worry. After the drug delivering mold has done its work we send in mold eating chinese needle snakes. But aren't those worse than the mold you say? Don't worry. After the mold's all gone we then send in gorillas to eat the snakes. What about the fact that you now have gorillas in your eyes? That's the real brilliance of the plan. Come winter, all the gorillas will freeze to death and the natural cleaning function of your eyes will flush them out after a short period, and you'll be fully cured!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by iminplaya ( 723125 )
      They don't think there would be a minor complication with getting rid of the mold afterwards?

      Just break it.

  • CSF (Score:2)

    by Zouden ( 232738 )
    How are you going to get bacteria into the cerebrospinal fluid? Inject them? If you're going to do that, why not just inject the drug?
    • Give'em a map and make them walk. I did it when I was a kid.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      How are you going to get [drug-carrying] bacteria into the cerebrospinal fluid? Inject them? If you're going to do that, why not just inject the drug?

      Shhh! You're gonna fjck up our funding, dude!
         

  • Speedy little buggers (Score:5, Informative)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @08:42PM (#17787054) Journal
    As the attached bacteria rotate their flagella, feeding on surrounding glucose, they push their bead forward at speeds of around 15 microns per second.

    As interesting as this sounds, they sure aren't going anywhere very fast.

    15 microns is about 0.00059 inches [google.com], so to travel one inch, it would take about 1,700 seconds, or a half an hour. IANAD, but it seems like you'd have better luck just letting the body's digestive and circulatory systems do the work for you.

    As an added bonus you won't need to start spraying Lysol's Mold and Mildew Remover in your eyes, ears, and uh, other places.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Good call. I suspect the aim is to deliver it to places that could have issues if they are ruptured, or there are other reasons they can't just jam a needle in. It -is- hard to imagine a scenerio where they don't mind that it takes several hours for the drug/chemical to do its thing, though. I mean, if you want to pump someone full of drugs, you generally want to do it -right now-.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 )

      15 microns is about 0.00059 inches, so to travel one inch, it would take about 1,700 seconds, or a half an hour.

      Sometimes there is a need to have a delayed administration of drugs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by real gumby ( 11516 )

      IANAD, but it seems like you'd have better luck just letting the body's digestive and circulatory systems do the work for you.

      Actually, getting drugs past the body's first-pass metabolism [nottingham.ac.uk] is quite a big deal. The stomach, kidneys et al are pretty good at trying to keep toxins/undesirables out of the bloodstream. Getting this stuff into aqueous environments elsewhere in the body helps you skip that step.

      As a side-effect, you can administer less drug. For biologics (basically: proteins) this is a big deal

  • S. marcescens, the type that makes your shower curtain moldy

    I was bothered by the slashdot summary because I didn't know that bacteria "did the mold thing." The article says that these bacteria contribute to pink stains, which I have seen and know but don't think of as being "moldy" per se. (The article doesn't use the term mold.)

    Just so that I'm clear on this...isn't mold specifically referring to fungi?
  • But my shower curtain isn't moldy.

  • Unlikely (Score:3, Interesting)

    by juushin ( 632556 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @09:46PM (#17787268)
    Two points.

    First. Who on earth is going to introduce a potentially pathogenic strain of bacteria into their bodily fluids--for example cerebral spinal fluids. I have no problem with science fiction, but let's keep the distinction between science/science fiction obvious.

    Second. This idea of harnessing bacteria to move things around has already been done several times over now. The first demonstration was by Hiratsuka with Mycoplasma. Then Berg (Harvard) had a different approach with Serratia. Then Whitesides (Harvard) used Chlamydomonas. In fact, Wired magazine had a short summary of much of this work in the December 2006 issue.

    Correct me if I am wrong but I don't see why this article has been slashdotted. Whoever checked off on this article needs to read up on science a little more closely.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nutt98 ( 961257 )

      Who on earth is going to introduce a potentially pathogenic strain of bacteria into their bodily fluids--for example cerebral spinal fluids.
      Call me crazy but I'm gonna say people without an alternative.

      I have no problem with science fiction
      I'm sure of it, but you seem to have a problem with science.
  • Now serving your eye cavity!
  • they push their bead forward at speeds of around 15 microns per second. Well at least its faster then a Japanese car. ZING!

    /me ducks

  • Slashdotted!

    Any cached version ? Google hasn't got this yet.

  • the eyes have it (Score:3, Informative)

    by ianchaos ( 160825 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @10:17PM (#17787392)
    There is one good reason to work on this type of medicine delivery device and that is the eyes. The interior of the eye has NO blood flow. Delivering medicine inside the eye has some very tricky problems.

    1. It needs to be perfectly clear...and/or
    2. After it is injected it then needs to be able to be completely absorbed through the interior of the eye so as to not leave any residue floating around.
    3. You can't go injecting a large amount of fluid into an already full fluid sac. High pressure against the retina can tear the retina wall, and can rupture the incredibly fine veins that supply the retina with blood (causing large amounts of what are known as floaters).
    4. How do you get the medicine to disperse evenly throughout the fluid in the eye. If it's heavy it sinks, equal to the eye fluid it generally stays where it is, or eventually sinks, or if it's lighter then the fluid in they eye it rises to the top. Perhaps severely shaking the patient after the injection would help...

    Now if you had a colony of microbes which could be directed to different areas in the eye or simply ordered to disperse and deliver the drug when it comes into contact with "x" then you would have something.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Eccles ( 932 )
      If it could get rid of those stupid floaters, I would be *so* happy...
  • Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University fixed the bacteria to the micro-capsules and then used chemicals to turn on and off their motion-producing flagella.

    And despite the billion or so tiny bacteria voices, no one at CMU noticed when they said:
    We as one welcome our new bacteria-enslaving scientist overlords!
  • The elderly today dred having to pass a kidney stone ... when I'm that old, I'll get to look forward to passing gearboxes cause some terribly underpaid medical tech made a wrong left turn near my spleen.
  • Instead of flea circuses we can have bacteria circuses!
  • People for the Ethical Treatment of Bacteria start bombing government facilities in attempts to put an end to bacterial slave labor.
  • {whip snap} row! row! row! {snap} row! row! row!
  • Don't expect fast deliveries, they're not UPS. They only do 1.3mm per day (15nm/s). And lets hope direction is not an issue.
    --

  • I read the article and just skimmed the comments. The most common objection to this is "what about the mold; we don't like mold, mold is harmful, et cetera." The point of this new technology is that the researchers used chemicals to turn on the motion-producing flagella of an organism. Just ignore the word mold and replace it with any other bacteria. Hell, replace it with cockroach or zombie. If we could inject a chemical into a plant and get it to open and close its petals on OUR time instead of the sun's
  • if we can harness the power of stupidity we will be able to reach places never before thought possible.
  • The Trojan bacterium.
  • Bacteria Harnessed As Micro-Robot Motors

    About damned time!

    Too many bacteria are parasitic slackers.

    Let the little boogers pull their own weight around here for a change, that's what I say!

    -kgj
  • Serratia marcescens is responsible for some pretty nasty pneumonias in hospitalized patients (I've seen quite a few cases in ICU's). That pink stain on the shower curtain they refer to turns into a dark red glob of sputum. It is also the cause of some urinary tract infections. In addition, they are also occasionally resistant to certain antimicrobials.
  • The cryptofascist scientific community has gone too far! First it was abuse of multicellular animals, but now they intend to work our unicellular cousins to death! Just what happens to those poor S. marcescens bacteria when they've been forced to push those oh-so-neato drugs on the streetcorners of our fluid systems? They die! They aren't able to stop and grab a break, or a snack, or anything. In fact, why are they even considering putting a helpless little organism into a place its never evolved for? What
    • I reread that comment a few minutes later, and realized that some fools might not realize it was a joke, and can even take it seriously. I in no way support PETA or the fluff-brained nutjobs who are its most ardent supporters.
  • but wouldn't immune system attack bacteria? The "motors" may get clogged with antibodies faster then you can shout: "Lookout ! The macrophages are incoming!"

    CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP...
  • Do you line up the injection point and angle? What about in the blood stream - how do you target a specific area? Or is just general movement to goal?

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