News, Bacterial soundtracks revealed by graphene membrane

Have you ever wondered if bacteria make distinctive sounds? If we could listen to bacteria, we would be able to know whether they are alive or not. When bacteria are killed using an antibiotic, those sounds would stop – unless of course the bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic. This is exactly what a team of researchers from TU Delft , led by dr. Farbod Alijani, now have managed to do: they captured low-level noise of a single bacterium using graphene. Now, their research is published in Nature Nanotechnology.

Farbod Alijani’s team was originally looking into the fundamentals of the mechanics of graphene, but at a certain point they wondered what would happen if this extremely sensitive material comes into contact with a single biological object.
“Graphene is a form of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms and is also known as the wonder material,” says Alijani. “It’s very strong with nice electrical and mechanical properties, and it’s also extremely sensitive to external forces.”

The team of researchers initiated a collaboration with the nano biology group of Cees Dekker and the nanomechanics group of Peter Steeneken. Together with PhD student Irek Roslon and postdoc Dr. Aleksandre Japaridze, the team ran their first experiments with E. coli bacteria. Cees Dekker: “What we saw was striking! When a single bacterium adheres to the surface of a graphene drum, it generates random oscillations with amplitudes as low as a few nanometers that we could detect. We could hear the sound of a single bacterium!”

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