Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Cells, Microbes & Viruses => Topic started by: paul.fr on 29/05/2007 22:47:08
-
From a recent edition of The Naked Scientist
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/705/
The Naked Scientists
Science Interviews
Sizing Up the World's Weighing Smallest Scales
Professor Scott Manalis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This week, Scientists at MIT have announced that they have developed the world’s smallest scales – even capable of measuring the weight of a single bacterium.
To explain how it works, we spoke to Scott Manalis, who leads the Nanoscale Sensing group at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
in what practical applications will this be used? and why do we need to know the weight of a single bacterium?
-
faster, more accurate cell counts?
-
Surely all bacteria don't have exactly the same weight. Bacteria of the same species, or even in the same culture would have different weights depending on the individual. I guess if you weighed about 100 of them you could get a pretty close average, but bacterial DNA changes so rapidly it seems like you would probably have to re-weigh every week or so. I think the plate count method or spectrophotometric analysis would be easier and probably more accurate for cell counts.
They say they want to be able to ID bacteria by their weight. I think that's impossible.
I think they just did it to be able to say that they did.
By the way...
How do they calibrate a balance that small??
and
What units do they weigh bacteria in?? nanograms? picograms?? does it get any smaller?? aaaaaaaaaah yes...femtograms (1/1000th of a picogram)
-Very Interesting Stuff, Mr. Paul [:D]