Infections Fight To The Death Inside This 3D-Printed Chimpanzee Skull

Infections Fight To The Death Inside This 3D-Printed Chimpanzee Skull

A research team at the University of Texas, led by chemists Jodi Connell, Marvin Whiteley and Jason Shear, has 3D-printed this microscopic chimpanzee skull as an unsettling proof-of-concept for trapping bacteria in “microscopic houses”, described as “tiny zoos for the study of infections”.

The team made the sinister skull — like a ghostly death’s head emerging from the ether — by firing lasers at a substrate of gelatin. Wherever the laser hits, “a solid matrix forms,” allowing the production of three-dimensional shapes.

Better yet, their laser uses a “chip adapted from a digital movie projector”, as if a film could be brought to unnerving life on a microscopic level, conjuring real, physical objects out of short bursts of light.

Jason Shear explained in a phone call with Gizmodo that they can “build up 3D objects” using the technique, in a way that he compared to a 3D Etch-a-Sketch. His team used sequential CAT scan data of a chimpanzee skull taken from the Digital Morphology lab at the university — in fact, apparently this data set — mostly for the technical challenge, although Shear added that they also got data sets for beetles, lizards, and bats.

The overall idea is to seal bacteria inside the resulting “cages”. Then, trapped in this microscopic jail cell, the bacteria’s capacity to cause infections and to resist — or succumb to — antibiotics can be rigorously tested. The chimpanzee skull seen here — though purely a virtuoso example of what’s possible with gelatin-based 3D-printing — is thus a weirdly appropriate image for the experiment, as these “tiny zoos” are more like Thunderdomes: death cages for unlucky bacteria fighting to the bitter end against antibiotics.

As Phys.Org reports, the “resulting structures can be of almost any shape or size”, with nearly infinite variables for design. Team member Jodi Connell explains how these printing technologies are a kind of microscopic architecture, allowing the design and creation of total environments where Connell and her colleagues control every physical detail. Shear goes all the way with the architectural metaphor, adding that they were able “to print or build the houses around the bacteria”, without relying on the bacteria themselves to move into the resulting structures; it was print-in-place construction on a microscopic scale.

The design can be controlled to an astonishing degree, down to “what a single bacterium feels and senses,” Connell told Phys.Org. “We can also much more precisely simulate the kinds of complex bacterial ecologies that exist in actual infections, where there typically aren’t just one but multiple species of bacteria interacting with each other.”

We’ll keep our eyes out for future simulated infections fighting to the death inside 3D-printed microscopic houses — not to mention tiny chimpanzee skulls, lizard skulls, bat skulls, and human skulls. Microscopic skulls coming to a surface near you. Stay tuned. [Phys.Org]

PICS J. Connell et al., University of Texas at Austin


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.