Controlled Deposition of Bacteria for Living Structured Materials.

Bacterial cells are in essence self-contained, highly complex, nanoscale machines. It is of great interest to harness these "nanomachines" as components in engineered devices. With recent advances in genetic engineering and the resulting growth in synthetic biology there is enormous potential to use the combination of biology and nanotechnology to build living nanostructures with new functionalities. In nanotechnology, a major hurdle in successful device construction involves spatial and temporal manipulation of the component building blocks, whether they are molecules, particles or cells, into operational structures. While single cells can be manipulated electrically and biochemically, this process becomes prohibitive if a device involves a large number of cells. While progress is being made in fabricating surfaces to use as immobilization platforms little is known about how to control deposition of the bacteria on these surfaces.

We have recently used evaporation directed assembly to produce viable two-dimensional bacterial films with intriguing networked spatial patterns and have developed a method to measure the elastic and adhesive properties of these films using a surface force apparatus. To our knowledge this is the first work to address controlled assembly of living bacteria for nanotechnology applications.

Click here to watch a Windows Media Player compatible video of a drop of an aqueous solution of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 drying on mica.