Researchers hope bio-nanobot germ will respond and provide information one day to certain stimulus

03/24/2015 - 00:00

By Jeanne Galatzer-Levy -

As nanotechnology makes possible a world of machines too tiny to see, researchers are finding ways to combine living organisms with nonliving machinery to solve a variety of problems. Like other first-generation bio-robots, the new nanobot engineered at the University of Illinois at Chicago is a far cry from Robocop. It’s a robotic germ. UIC researchers created an electromechanical device — a humidity sensor — on a bacterial spore.

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Ref: Graphene Quantum Dots Interfaced with Single Bacterial Spore for Bio-Electromechanical Devices: A Graphene Cytobot.  Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 9138 doi:10.1038/srep09138