| Date | 18th, Apr 2022 |
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A graphene drum can reveal the sound of bacteria.
Have you ever wondered if bacteria make distinctive sounds? If we could listen to bacteria, we would be able to know whether they are alive or not. When bacteria are killed using an antibiotic, those sounds would stop – unless of course, the bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic. This is exactly what a team of researchers from TU Delft, led by dr. Farbod Alijani, has now managed to do: they captured low-level noise of a single bacterium using graphene. Now, their research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Farbod Alijani’s team at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) was originally investigating the fundamentals of the physical mechanics of graphene, when a curious idea struck them. They wondered what would happen if this extremely sensitive material came into contact with a single biological object. “Graphene is a form of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms and is also known as the wonder material,” says Alijani. “It’s very strong with nice electrical and mechanical properties, and it’s also extremely sensitive to external forces.”
