Synthetic biology with nanomaterials
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esearch Letter
Synthetic biology with nanomaterials Sanhita Ray and Ahana Mukherjee, Department of Biochemistry, University of Calcutta, 35, Ballygunge Circular Road, Kolkata-700019, West Bengal, India Pritha Chatterjee, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, USA Kaushik Chakraborty, Centre for Research in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, JD 2, Sector III, Salt Lake, Kolkata-700 098, West Bengal, India Anjan Kr Dasgupta, Department of Biochemistry, University of Calcutta, 35, Ballygunge Circular Road, Kolkata-700019, West Bengal, India Address all correspondence to Anjan Kr Dasgupta at [email protected]; [email protected] (Received 9 January 2018; accepted 13 February 2018)
Abstract Magnetic field has been used to trigger biofilm formation. Iron oxide nanoparticles were attached to bacterial cells and cells were aggregated by application of magnetic field. Artificial cellular crowding triggered quorum sensing and led to the formation of biofilm at the sub-threshold population. Aggregation process was monitored by studying temporal dynamics of capacitance and conductance profiles. Capacitive profile exhibited a plateau upon introduction of magnetic field which was retained even after field was removed. This hysteresis property signified biofilm initiation in response to artificial crowding. This work demonstrates how synthetic biology is enabled by including nanoparticles in the interactome.
Introduction [1,2]
Synthetic biology has been viewed till now as the prerogative of molecular systems biologists and geneticists. Most work in this field has involved creation of an artificial genetic network and housing it inside a single cell. A major aim in synthetic biology is to control the expression from this circuitry by means of external stimuli. Cellular computational processes have been achieved but only within a single cell. Synthetic approaches have never been used to investigate emergent (nonlinear) output at the population level. The simplest example of population-based computing is bacterial quorum sensing (QS).[3] QS is a response[4] to cellular crowding. Such crowding occurs upon cell division and population increase. Microbial crowding and consequent QS give rise to a number of physiological changes in the population, for example, bioluminescence in Vibrio fisheri, and virulence gene expression in virulent species. One well-studied consequence of QS is biofilm formation[5,6] initiation. Quorum threshold crossing has been observed in single bacterium kept in a microfluidic well.[7] These authors have introduced the idea of “bacterium in a box” which bears some parallel with the present work. This inspired the present concept that, even without cell growth, we may achieve increased local cell density by pulling the cells together. Super-paramagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs)[8–12] can be aggregated by application of the static magnetic field.[11] The underlying strategy is to attach suitably functionalized SPIONs to target cells. Cellular aggregatio
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