Barbapappa bacterium teaches researchers about cell division – De Gelderlander

Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft are the first in the world in the form of E.coli bacteria to just managed to turn their hand. They showed the intestinal bacteria naturally thin rods, grow to squares, triangles and circles. Seven bacteria even formed the letters’ TU Delft. The researchers explained that protein patterns expose that are crucial for the multiplication of bacteria.

Protein scan the bacteria to determine where sharing must take place. The wave pattern changes as the shape and size of the bacteria is changing.

cells or bacteria multiply, they must themselves split into two equal halves. They know exactly where they need while sharing themselves, a fact that research manager Cees Dekker of the Delft University fascinates some time. ,, We know that the distribution of certain proteins within the cell before the key, but the big question was how those proteins are so able to distribute? “”, Explains the professor.

Proteins form grope down
To investigate this process, the researchers employed a chemical trick, making the cell wall and the bacteria week ,, as a pudding into a mold ” had quit. From the experiment it appears that special proteins in a wave-like movement, the shape of the bacterium scan to determine as ‘in the middle’.

Depending on the shape and size of the bacteria the proteins adjust their search strategy. A bacterium in the form of a T, however, does not have an exact copy of the division on. ,, Because we have tampered with the cell wall, it divides into an upper and lower part of the T ”, Dekker explains. ,, And later be the weather sticks. ”

Build your cell
an E.coli bacterium used to sense its shape two proteins, MinD and mine called. ,, The unraveling of this process is essential to better understand the process of cell division of bacteria, which could lead to new types of antibiotics, ” says Dekker.

To know exactly how cell division works Dekker wants to build a cell can divide. He refers to a famous quote that stood until his death on the blackboard of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman: “What I can not create, I do not understand” (What I can not build, I can not understand, ed.)

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,, The ultimate goal is to artificially build a living cell that consists entirely of loose parts, because that’s the only way to truly understand how essential life works. “” Within five years, Dekker thinks a vesicle to have made which itself can share without help.

Alan Turing
The theoretical model suggests that protein can form wave patterns of cell division to the stripes of a zebra, was drafted in 1953 by the British mathematician Alan Turing. He is best known for cracking the German Enigma code in World War II. As a tribute pins investigators his name with bacteria.

The results are published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.