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upstart writes:

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.

The team of researchers initiated a collaboration with the nanobiology group of Cees Dekker and the nanomechanics group of Peter Steeneken. Together with Ph.D. 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."

The extremely small oscillations are a result of the biological processes of the bacteria with main contribution from their flagella (tails on the cell surface that propel bacteria).

[...] This research has enormous implications for the detection of antibiotic resistance. The experimental results were unequivocal: If the bacteria were resistant to the antibiotic, the oscillations just continued at the same level. When the bacteria were susceptible to the drug, vibrations decreased until one or two hours later, but then they were completely gone. Thanks to the high sensitivity of graphene drums, the phenomenon can be detected using just a single cell.

Journal Reference:
Irek E. Rosłoń, Aleksandre Japaridze, Peter G. Steeneken, Cees Dekker & Farbod Alijani, Probing nanomotion of single bacteria with graphene drums, Nat. Nanotechnol., 2022.
DOI: 10.1038/s41565-022-01111-6

Original Submission