A team from the University of Leeds, UK and Japan’s Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology has used microbes that feed on iron.
As you eat the iron, microbes create small magnets inside themselves, similar to computer hard drives.The research may lead to the creation of hard drives much faster, the team of scientists.The study appears in the journal Small.As technology advances and computer components getting smaller, it becomes more difficult to produce electronics on a nanoscale.Thus, researchers are now turning to nature – and get the microbes involved.Magnetic bacteria In the current study, scientists used the magneticum Magnetospirilllum bacteria.These microorganisms naturally magnetic generally live in aquatic environments such as ponds and lakes below the surface, where oxygen is scarce.
They swim along the lines of Earth’s magnetic field, aligning in the magnetic field as a compass needle in search of preferred oxygen concentrations.
When the intake of iron bacteria, proteins in their bodies interact with it to produce small crystals of magnetite ore, the most magnetic mineral on Earth.After studying how microbes gather, shape and position of these nano-magnets inside themselves, the researchers copied the method and applied out of the bacteria, producing a “growing” magnets that could in future help build hard drives.“We are rapidly reaching the limits of traditional production of electronic and computer components get smaller,” said lead researcher Dr Sarah Staniland, University of Leeds.“The machines we have traditionally used to construct them are clumsy on such small scales.“Nature has given us the perfect tool for [dealing with] this problem.”
Biological CablesIn addition to using microorganisms to produce magnets, the researchers also succeeded in creating tiny electrical wires of living organisms.Was created nanoscale tubes made of the membrane of cells, grown in a controlled laboratory environment with the help of a protein in human lipid molecules.
A membrane is a film of a biological “wall” which separates the interior of a cell from the outside environment.Such tubes in the future could be used as bio-engineering microscopic wires, capable of transferring information, as do the cells in our bodies – inside a computer, Dr. Masayoshi Tanaka of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
“These cables can have biological electrical resistance and can transfer information from one set of cells within a bio-computer to all other cells,” he said.
In addition to computers, these biological wires, you could even use in the future for human surgery, as they are highly biocompatible, Dr. Tanaka said.“Several tiny wires have been developed worldwide, but biocompatibility remains problematic,” he said.“The nano-wires manufactured in this study were covered with the cellular membrane components, which in theory are highly biocompatible.”
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