Team:Paris Bettencourt/Preliminaries

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In the Ben-Yehuda paper [1] a set of simple experiments are made to prove the existence of the nanotubes. We tryied to reproduce some of them in order to demonstrate again the existence of these entities as a medium of communication between bacteria, and to be sure we are in the good experimental conditions to produce them and that we can go on with our designs.

We tryied to reproduce the two keystone experiments of the paper: the GFP diffusion, and the antibiotic resistance exchange, with less sucess for the latter.

The GFP diffusion experiment is the simplest experiment possible. One Bacillus Subtlis strain that produce GFP is mixed with a wild type strain. If some nanotubes are formed, the GFP will diffuse through the tubes and color the non fluorescent strain. We invite you to visit corresponding the page to learn more about what we did and the results we had.

The antibiotic resistance exchange is a more tricky experiment in which bacteria are shown to exchange resistance enzyme through nanotube and allow the population to survive even though all the cells does not carry the resistence.