Communication with bacteria
Well, how dó we use bacteria to spread personal messages between students? The easiest way out is saying that bacteria will spread them selfs from human to human and eventually will end up on the receiver of the message. Bacteria actually have a way of communicating with each other, called quorum sensing [1]. This is used to coordinate a decentralized group, like bacteria. But how could we ever make sure that every bacteria (the whole message) reaches the correct receiver? And what will happen if it reaches the wrong one? Apart from that, the message might take way too long.
Scientists managed to program bacteria to react on each other by sensing a chemical change in some of them and then emit light in a certain color [2]. In this way they could create some sort of information visualization; the bacteria could produce a color pattern showing an icon of the chemicals they were sensing. If we would be able to create such a system then we might be able to write messages using bacteria. But for personal messages we would still need to find out how to transmit the bacteria to the recipient.
Other solutions might be using insects insead of bacteria like the American army does [3] or creating an OLED display like a petri dish on which we could coordinate bacteria more easily [4].
Sources
- Quorum sensing @ WP, the way bacteria communicate with eachother to coordinate behaviour
- Programmable cells, turning bacteria into living computers (nature article)
- Pentagon plans cyber-insect army
- OLED @ WPsimple
Below are some other sources not mentioned in the article.
- The bacteria has its own light
- Genetically altered bacteria for data storage
- Using the game of life to spread the bacteria?
- Bacteria in Art The aesthetic microbe: ProkaryArt and EukaryArt
- Dattoo, the body as information platform (@ liftthink blog)