Researchers at the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo (IP Montevideo) elucidated the mechanisms that allow bacteria, upon receiving information from the environment, to execute actions that allow them to survive.
This research was published in the international scientific journal Science Signaling and is part of a work that also led to the creation of a digital comic available on a website to convey the contribution of the study in language of scientific dissemination.
The main finding of the work is to understand how information is transmitted in bacteria. That is, how the cables that run from the antennas (in other words, sensors present in the bacteria that capture information from the environment in which they are located) to the cellular interior, where there are components that receive this information and modify the execution of certain biochemical or genetic programs.
The group of researchers -integrated by Sofía Lima, Juan Imelio,, Marcos Nieves,, Federico Carrión,, Alejandro Buschiazzo y Philip Trajtenberg of the IP Montevideo; and scientists from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad de la República (Udelar) – found chemical and biophysical explanations of how the system ensures that the information goes in the right direction and efficiently, without wasting cellular energy.
The importance of this finding can be compared, for example, to the work done in computer science when writing software code to interpret what each command executed on a computer means. The same occurs in bacteria, which could be compared as “nanorobots” that perform the functions they receive from the mechanism described in the research.
Beyond the scientific implications of this contribution, the team of researchers also sought to share the knowledge generated over years of work on bacteria through a web page they titled Bacterial feeling, how do bacteria feel?
To this end, the illustrators of Bandas Educativas -Alejandro Rodríguez Juele and Nicolas Peruzzo- were asked to create two comics that tell, in a simple and entertaining way, how two bacteria -Bacillussubtilis and Leptospira-feel cold, hunger or a factor that endangers their survival.
On the website you can access information about what bacteria are, how they sense, why it is important to know their mechanisms for sensing, and what the Molecular and Structural Microbiology Laboratory of the institute does.
