Team:Paris Bettencourt

The recent discovery of nanotubes between individual B.subtilis by Dubey and Ben-Yehuda spiked our interest. Through very detailed and advanced microscopy, they showed nanotubes forming between cells and that a wide rande of proteins could pass through this communication channel (GFP, calcein, antibiotics, ...). They also showed signs of communication between B.subtilis and E.coli, another species entirely. With these synthetic-biology-friendly bacterium and a potentially non-specific cell-to-cell transportation system, the possibilities for designing new systems seem endless!

Fig1: Extracts from the Dubey-Ben-Yehuda article [1]

Our goal this summer was to see how the synthetic biology community could harness the power of amorphous computation and metabolic engineering of this nanotube network. Each cell is potentially a tiny individual computer linked directly and only to its closest neighbours. The existence of the so-called nanotubes is however still debated.

We decided therefore to investigate this phenomenon and characterize it using the tools synthetic biology provides. We created new B.subtilis BioBricks, filling a surprising hole in the part registry since very few iGEM teams worked on this organism in the past. Those BioBricks were used to provide new evidence supporting the existence of a nanotube network.