Bacteria on monkey bars

Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria that can spread through the body at a high rate. The method by which it does so has recently been discovered by a team of Canadian scientists.

What is Lyme disease?

The red spot caused by a tick

When you get bitten by a tick that carries Lyme disease, you develop a big red spot around the place you’ve been bitten. Shortly after that, the disease cause all kinds of symptoms all over your body; headaches, stomach aches, muscles soreness and other undesirable things. Because the symptoms appear quite soon after you’ve been bitten by a tick, usually a couple of weeks, the disease spreads incredibly fast through your body. The disease can do that because the Lyme bacteria, that cause the disease, can travel through your bloodstream. But how those bacteria could actually do so, remained a mystery for quite a while. But now, Rhodaba Ebady and Tara Moriarty have found out, after closely studying the bacteria moves.

Which way to go?

The weird thing is, the bacteria doesn’t just float away in a blood vessel in the direction blood is flowing in that vessel. The bacteria can also be quite stubborn and actually climb up, against the direction of the blood flow in that blood vessel. Because of this, the Lyme bacteria can spread through your body twice as fast as when the bacteria would just float around. And this also explains how the bacteria, which is called B. burgorferi can affect your whole body so quickly.

The green and orange stripes are Lyme bacteria,
the colour us in which stage in
their monkey bar jumping they are.

Bacterial monkey bars…?

To study the odd nature of the spread of B. burgdorferi, researchers built an artificial blood vessel which matched the workings of a normal human blood vessel. A B. burgdorferi was placed into the fake vessel,  and then the scientists observed the interactions of the bacteria and the vessel. The way this bacteria works is by attaching itself onto the wall of the vessel. It forms bonds with the wall and undergoes a cycle of breaking and making bonds. By doing so, it acts somewhat like a child swinging on monkey bars. They hold on using two bonds for a period of time. When they let go of one bond, they slingshot themselves forwards and attach themselves to the wall with another bond. By doing this continuously, they can creep through the vessels. This technique is also used by certain human immune cells called leukocytes.

Further use of this technique

Thanks to this study, we are learning more and more about different bacteria. This could help us learn how to cure diseases caused by these bacteria and it could even be mimicked in robotics to move against the flow of blood vessels with little to no problems.

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Sources:

http://www.lymenet.nl/info/lyme-symptomen

http://www.tekenbeetziekten.nl/symptomen/

http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/bacteria-on-the-run-an-interview-with-tara-moriarty-and-rhodaba-ebady

http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(16)31059-2

http://www.gezondbeterworden.nl/digitaal-tijdschrift/ziekte-van-lyme-een-natuurgeneeskundig-perspectief.html

http://www.livescience.com/55895-lyme-disease-bacteria-spread.html

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lyme-bacteria-swap-%E2%80%98catch-bonds%E2%80%99-navigate-blood-vessels

http://www.livescience.com/55895-lyme-disease-bacteria-spread.html

Sunlight and carbon dioxide turned into methane

With the problem of increasing carbon dioxide levels, many are trying to find ways to change this gas into something useful. Some scientists have recently engineered bacteria to do just that.

Rhodopseudomonas palustris

Make the bacteria do it!

Kathryn Fixen and her team have recently engineered a bacterium, Rhodopseudomonas palustris, to make methane from carbon dioxide. By tweaking the enzyme nitrogenase, which normally creates ammonia, scientists have managed to make it catalyze the reaction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to methane (CH4). They then managed to modify the R. palustris bacterium to make it mass produce the engineered nitrogenase. Since this bacteria can use sunlight as a source of energy, it is easier to create a large amount of this enzyme using natural sources. This makes it both eco-friendly and efficient.

Use of methane

Methane is the principal component of natural gas, which can be found in large bubbles in the soil all over our planet.  If you live in a cold country, you would use this to warm your house. It can also be used to make electricity and to power certain vehicles. Some people also cook on natural gas. This versatility of this gas makes it useful in many daily scenarios.

Not yet perfect
The other method which would be used to make methane would be through the use of methanogens. These microorganisms naturally produce methane and can be found in many different places including the human large intestine. The only problem with them is that they require different materials such as acetate to make methane and they can’t make it without the help of other microorganisms. This means that it requires multiple steps for the reaction to happen. With the new method though, the reaction happens in one step. As well as this, it can happen in a living organism, this means that it can happen at room temperature. Another advantage to this method is that it makes it easy to tweak since there is only one main step which needs to be changed. But, even with with all of its advantages, this engineered nitrogenase is still not as efficient at transforming compounds as the natural nitrogenase. “The normal enzyme makes about two hydrogens for every [molecule of] ammonia,” Co-author Caroline Harwood said. “The altered enzyme makes a thousand hydrogens for every molecule of methane.”

Ongoing research
The research is still going on as the scientists are attempting to find a way to increase the efficiency of the enzyme. Who knows, maybe some time in the future we will be reliant on these bacterium to create fuels for all of us to live a sustainable life.

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Sources:

http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2016/08/23/stories/1060041923

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/engineered-bacterium-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-methane-fuel/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071210103934.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/08/16/1611043113

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Nitrogenase.png/220px-Nitrogenase.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/R._palustric_bacteria.png

http://www.grisanik.com/static/images/51-ch4.png

http://faculty.college-prep.org/~bernie/sciproject/project/Kingdoms/Bacteria3/methanogens.gif

Quantum bits times four

Quantum bits are the building blocks of Quantum computers because they represent two numbers at the same time. Scientists have now developed a quantum bit that represent four numbers simultaneously, instead of just two.

A simple picture of an atom

Fully controlled atom
Normal quantum bits basically consist of an electron (the really small particles that orbit atoms) trapped in certain kinds of material. This combination then starts to behave like an atom, but a very special one. We can control all the properties of this ‘artificial atom’. Normal atoms can have a few specific energy levels. These energy levels depend on the orbits of the electrons. The bigger the orbit, the higher the energy level. Since we can control all properties of ‘artificial atoms’, we can also control the energy level and keep it steady. With this advantage, we can focus on a really weird property of the atom; its spin.

Like a spinning top spinning both ways
You can imagine artificial atoms to be a bit like spinning-tops. They can either spin to the right or to the left. The artificial atoms can do the same. The quantum computer then calls a spin to the right zero and a spin to the left one for example. But if you don’t look at the atom, it can actually spin both ways at the same time, and thus the artificial atom can represent both a one and a zero. But as soon as you look at it, it’s suddenly either a one or a zero. This strange property enables quantum computers to run multiple calculations at once, while normal computers can only do one at a time. Really fast, that is, but still one at the time.

Graphene is weird
But now, scientists have discovered that we can really change the properties of an artificial atom by trapping it in graphene. Instead of two types of spin, it suddenly has four. The spinning top cannot only spin to the left and to the right, but also up and down. And you can now imagine it better as a ball. The quantum computer can call the two new spins two and three, and suddenly it has two whole new numbers to play with. This can make the quantum computer even faster, since it can do even more calculations in the sameamount of time.

The atoms are picky
But there is one problem though. For the artificial atoms to actually turn into balls instead of spinning-tops, and get four possible spins, they have to be trapped in a very smooth piece of graphene. If the graphene is a bit rough on the edges, the artificial atom will refuse to turn into a ball and just keep its two spins. And graphene is notoriously hard to make since it consists of a single layer of carbon atoms. So it’s incredibly thin and delicate. This makes it really unlikely that this new discovery will be used in some new invention any time soon, since further research has to be done to make these special artificial atoms more stable.

Click here to read more about physics

Sources:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/sifter/electron-prisons-could-be-used-develop-quantum-technology

http://phys.org/news/2016-08-artificial-atom-graphene.html

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b02548

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b02548

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galliumarsenide

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/A_tough_gang_of_Spinning_Tops.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/9c15428e11922a9288d1457acac7a2f805630fc9.gif