Do you speak bacteria? The first conversations with microbes are already under way.

Manuel Porcar at the University of Valencia in Spain and his colleagues are developing a way for bacteria and humans to talk to each other, by converting light waves into speech. So far the bacteria have told the team how suitable their surroundings are.

Porcar’s team engineered gene switches in Escherichia coli to produce proteins that emit different coloured fluorescent light when factors such as heat, acidity and oxygen levels change. This meant the microbes would glow in different colours when they were, say, too hot. When the team tweaked the environment the E. coli were growing in, the amount of light emitted by the bacteria went up or down according to how well their needs were being served.

The next step is to use a microprocessor to convert the light waves into speech.


Do as I say

“The strategy of encoding questions and answers in ‘light language’ is feasible, and a first step towards true dialogue with bacteria,” says Porcar.

Swapping banter with bacteria might be useful. We could, for example, put microbes in packaging so they can emit audible warnings if food goes off. The technology could also lead to better control of the microorganisms in industrial fermenters that make medicines.

The team even hopes to give orders to the microbes. The bacteria could be given a gene switch that was sensitive to specific light signals, and which would activate the gene to which it was linked.

“We plan to engineer one strain that responds to an order by encoding a voice message, such as ‘activate your gene’, into a light wavelength,” says Porcar.

Journal reference: Letters in Applied Microbiology, DOI: 10.1111/LAM.12255