According to Biever’s article, “the press will ‘print’ live bacteria onto solid surfaces in precise patterns, a technique that may help explain how bacteria influence each other spatially.

“Understanding these relationships will help find ways of thwarting their attacks and using them to clean up pollutants.”

Doug Weibel, a member of the Harvard University team that built the printing press was quoted in the article as saying, “One thing we want to study is the distance dependence for signalling between two adjacent bacteria on a surface.”

Existing techniques for patterning bacteria are crude at best, with the liquid spreading out, making it impossible to create delicate, reproducible patterns.

Biever’s article states that Weibel borrowed from the technique of photolithography used in silicon chip manufacture, using a “patterned chip as a mould, into which he pours a liquid polymer. This cools, sets and is popped out, forming a stamp. This is then coated with agarose, a nutrient gel that bacteria will grow on. He pipettes solutions of bacteria onto the agarose, which sucks out the water, leaving a solid layer of bacteria.

“To print the bacteria, this stamp is simply pressed into a clean nutrient gel, producing a living replica of the original pattern, with features as small as 1 micrometre across, the size of one bacterium. As some bacteria remain on the stamp, it is ‘re-inked’ by warming until the bacteria multiply to form a fresh carpet over its surface.”

Read the complete article on the New Scientist website.

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter