Bacterial Printing Press

juushin writes "New Scientist has reported that scientists at Harvard University have created a bacterial printing press that can be reconfigured to print complex patterns of bacteria. The technology is reported to have applications in studying biofilms, communication between bacteria (and colonies of bacteria), and the interaction of bacteria and surfaces. Of medical interest, these applications may lead to a better understanding of how to prevent bacterial infections."

Comments

bacterial computation

[carcosa30]

This sounds like a good way to study computational properties of bacterial colonies. By printing them like this, perhaps they would be able to get them to behave in ways that would perform useful information processing. It might also end up acting as some sort of "interface" to DNA computation.

Whether we'd be able to get them to behave in reproducible ways would be the question.

Here are some links. The first has some interesting photos of bacterial colonies-- similar to cellular automata, because hey! They are! And the second is a link to an article on bacterial colony computation. Or maybe they're both to Goatse. You won't know until you click.

http://alnk.org/dankwish
http://alnk.org/nearseal

Novel application of existing technology

[StateOfTheUnion]

I like the novel application of existing technologies. He's using agarose medium, pipetting, and casting into a photolithographic mold.

One thing in the article that is a bit deceptive is that the article says that one can print with details as small as one micrometer . . . the size of a single bacterium. This may technically be true, but I doubt that controlling which individual bacterium are transferred (printed) or not is possible. And the neither the technique of pipetting bacteria nor regrowing bacteria on the agarose media is likely to have a resolution of one micrometer. Though the postulated one micrometer resolution may be possible, it is for all practical purposes impossible.

Well this is going to make Snail Mail

[crovira]

a thing of the past. You already have to watch out when opening hand addressed mail for anthrax and shit like that but you have just lowered the bar for spreading viri.

Now it doesn't have to come by an email either.

Send something that looks like junk mail to a congressman's home in the winter and you can just see the trail of death and destruction because the ink itself could kill you. (ebola 'flavoured' ink anyone?)

I don't think this is too smart but the cat's out of the bag now. Pretty soon we're going to need transparent exo-skins to do anything. (Think about it.)