The microbiota is continuously being recognized as an important component in the maintenance of health and has been correlated with onset and progress of disease. Some diseases that are of neurological origin are now being recognized as a neuronal response to microbial infection e.g. Alzheimer disease. In addition, microbial metabolites capable to modulate emotional and physiological state of organism via neurons have been identified. Recently it has been shown that microbes mediate species-specific and inter-species interaction via electrical communication like neurons. This begets an interesting question – can neurons and microorganism communicate in an intelligible manner via ions? Given the rich behavioral and molecular repertoire shared by neurons and bacteria, we sought to develop a novel and molecularly-tractable platform within which direct inter-kingdom communication could be demonstrated and dissected. Our multi-modal system which integrates optical and electrical signal detection, revealed that neurons respond to the presence of bacteria, and that this response depends on the bacterial species and density. Likewise, bacteria showed responses to neural presence and activity, as revealed by specific changes in their membrane potential and calcium dynamics. Our proof-of-principle data in this highly tractable platform reveal crosstalk mediated by electrical and chemical signals and illustrate a novel example of cross-kingdom communication between highly diverse cell types. The ability to eavesdrop on information passing between these two very different levels of biological organization will facilitate the understanding of brain-bacteria communication for diagnosis of neuronal or bacterial states in health and disease.

Integrated electrical-optical interface between neurons and bacteria reveals bi-directional communication and coupled responses to the contact

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.