Bacteria in the bloodstream might sound like a health no-no, but they could be used to send messages between cancer-fighting nanobots. Maria Gregori and Ignacio Llatser at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, envision a future in which nanobots in the body sense tumour cells and release anticancer drugs to fight them. But one machine can't defeat a tumour single-handedly; it needs some way of telling the others to swarm on the target. Radio signals won't travel through a liquid, and chemical forms of communication work only across large or microscopic distances. On the scale of a few millimetres - the distance from one blood vessel to another-there is no way to transmit information. So the pair came up with the idea of using a non-pathogenic strain of E.coli with a message encoded in a DNA sequence that is inserted into its cytoplasm. Each nanobot would contain bacteria inscribed with every message that could be needed (Computer Networks, DOI: 10.1016/j. comnet.2010.10.019).
展开▼
