Scientists have found that some methanogenic bacteria can connect with each other in a kind of biological conduits and form some kind of connections, similar to how neurons exchange information with each other in the brain of animals, according to an article published in the journal Nature.
“Our discovery not only changes our understanding of bacteria, but also how we imagine our brain. All of our senses, emotions and intelligence grow out of the way brain cells exchange electrical signals that are triggered by ion channels. We found that bacteria use the same channels and electrical signals to co-emerge from uncomfortable environments,”said Guerol Sueel of the University of California, San Diego, USA.
Suelle and his colleagues came to this conclusion, trying to uncover an unusual secret from the life of large communities of bacteria, uniting in dense colonies - "films" of hundreds of thousands of individual microbes - how organisms in the center of such structures that do not have contact with the external environment, manage to survive.
Observing the life of such films, scientists have found out that cells on the surface of the film, which have unlimited access to food, periodically allow the inside of the colony to breathe. They stop growing, allowing nutrients to penetrate the depths of the colony, and microbes inside the film replenish food supplies.
Such an amazing synchronization of the behavior of bacteria located at long distances from each other made scientists think about how they could communicate with each other. The behavior of food - glutamate molecules - when moving inside the film indicated that this bacterial "Internet" can work on the basis of electrochemical signals.
Guided by this idea, the authors of the article measured how the voltage changes on the surface of bacterial membranes and inside the nutrient medium during periods of growth of the surface layer of microbes and during periods of calm.
It turned out that the voltage on the bacterial membrane fluctuated in time with the microbial growth cycles, which confirmed the guess of Xuel and his colleagues. These electrical vibrations, as the scientists explain, were generated by ion channels on the surface of the shells of microbes, similar in structure and shape to those ionic "pumps" that are on the surface of nerve cells in the brain.
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Bacterial ion channels work in a similar way - they pump in or out of the cell potassium ions, creating a difference in the concentration of potassium and sodium ions, which gives the microbe the ability to conduct electrical impulses through its surface.
If these channels and their associated genes are removed, the bacteria lose their ability to communicate with each other and the colony quickly disintegrates due to the inability to coordinate waves of growth and tranquility.
Interestingly, this signal, says Suelle, spreads along the microbial film in much the same way as pain impulses arise in the brain during the onset of migraines. Scientists hope that further study of the bacterial "brain" will help understand how you can fight these headaches.
Conversely, current migraine medications that block the transmission of such signals can in principle be used to interfere with the communication of bacteria. This could help fight the colonies of antibiotic-resistant microbes that often cause epidemics in hospitals, the biologists conclude.
