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!

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.