Tiny Graphene Drums Let Doctors Identify Bacteria By Sound
SoundCell’s “nanodrums” can ID germs from the acoustic patterns their movement makes
3 minutes ago
Identifying bacteria by sight can be quite difficult. Why not listen to them instead?
Researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands and the university’s spinoff company SoundCell think that bacterial infections could be diagnosed with sound. They’ve crafted a nanoscale drum kit that uses some of the world’s smallest percussion instruments to turn a bacterium’s motions into song.
Previously, the Delft researchers showed that listening to a germ’s drumbeat could quickly screen it for antibiotic resistance. Now, the same researchers have discovered that different bacteria play different sounds on the drum. They’ve shown they can identify a bacterium from its song alone.
“We can really look at the level of a single cell,” says Farbod Alijani, a mechanical engineer at TU Delft and one of the authors of a new paper. “We have that sensitivity.” Alijani and colleagues reported their latest findings this March in ACS Sensors.
The Delft researchers call their instrument of choice a “nanodrum.” Its drumhead is fashioned from two graphene sheets, less than 1 nanometer thick, laid atop a 8 micrometer-wide cavity. This size fits most bacteria, which are about one to 10 micrometers in length.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/soundcell-nan ... id=9335800