bacteria – The Health Care Blog

It’s Got a Good Beat and You Can Kill It

Apr 28, 2026

By KIM BELLARD

Most of us can identify dogs from cats just by the sounds they make. We could probably even separate a dog’s bark from a wolf’s howl. If you are a nature lover, you might be able to identify different species of birds by their calls. If you are a cetologist, you might be able to separate the vocalizations whales make versus those dolphins make. Across the animal world, we’ve learned the different sounds that different species make, which has been useful in our survival.

But did you ever wonder if you can identify, say, e coli from other bacteria?

It turns out that you can, thanks to research at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Four years ago, they showed that bacteria made noise, which was, in itself, a startling finding (admit it: would you have ever guessed that?). They used a thin layer of graphene to create a graphene “drum” small enough to fit a single bacterium. Team member Cees Dekker observed: “What we saw was striking! When a single bacterium adheres to the surface of a graphene drum, it generates random oscillations with amplitudes as low as a few nanometers that we could detect. We could hear the sound of a single bacterium!”

The team used this finding to accomplish an important purpose: to find out if bacteria were resistant to specific antibiotics. If an antibiotic was applied and the sound continued; it hadn’t worked. If the sounds stopped, the bacteria had been killed.

The team wasted no time in creating a start-up – SoundCell – to commercialize the finding. It promised to identify the “right” antibiotic in one hour, rather than subjecting patients to rounds of different antibiotics in search of one the bacteria wasn’t resistant to.

The team isn’t resting on their laurels. Some of them got to wondering, huh, I wonder if different bacteria make different sounds. And, their latest research shows, not only do they but, through machine learning, those different species can be distinguished. Team lead Farbod Alijani says. “With this new study, we take a significant leap forward: we show that each bacterial species has its own nanomotion signature.”

Mind. Blown.

The researchers focused on three bacteria that are common in hospital settings: E. coli, S. aureus (which causes staph infections) and K. pneumoniae (which causes pneumonia). They tested two different machine learning models; one correctly classified the bacteria 87% of the time, and the other 88% of the time.

Make Some Microbe Friends

Jun 1, 2021

By KIM BELLARD

It’s the coolest story I’ve seen in the past few days: The New York Times reported how an Italian museum cleaned its priceless Michelangelo sculptures with an army of bacteria. As Jason Horowitz wrote, “restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.”

And you just want to kill them all with your hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps.

The Medici Chapel in Florence had the good fortune to be blessed with an abundance of works by Michelangelo, but the bad fortune to have had centuries of various kinds of grime building up on them. In particular, over time the corpse of one Medici “…seeped into Michelangelo’s marble, the chapel’s experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations…”

This is, I assume, why they tell you not to touch the art.

Scientists picked a bacteria — Serratia ficaria SH7, in case you’re taking notes – that ate the undesired grime without also eating the underlying marble. It wasn’t hazardous to humans either and didn’t create spores that might go elsewhere. “It’s better for our health,” one of the art restorers told NYT. “For the environment, and the works of art.”

The technique was a success, allowing the sculptures to look like they did centuries ago.

Using such bacteria to clean art has been around for at a decade, and not just for sculptures. Perhaps more surprising is bacteria isn’t just cleaning art, it’s also creating it; the American Society for Microbiology hosts an annual Agar Art Contest.

If you’re impressed by that, researchers are teaching bacteria to read, or at least to recognize letters. That’s not all they might learn to do. “For example, the framework and algorithm in our study can be used to facilitate the design of living therapeutics, such as targeted drug release systems based on engineered probiotic bacteria systems,” the researchers say.

The thing is, we not only don’t know what microbes do, or could do, but we have only a vague understanding how they surround us. That’s starting to change. We’ve known for some time that each of us has a unique microbiome (including mycobiome!). What we didn’t realize until recently was that each urban area has its own microbiome as well.