Do Bacterial Cells Store Memories?

Some bacteria seem to be using a type of memory to help them alter future behaviors, based on their past experiences.

Hosted by: Olivia Gordon

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[Master_Therion]

I would think that memory is necessary for any organism to develop... culture.

[blkhwk]

awesome video, olivia! there's definitely some promise in figuring out what changes, in the molecular scale, occur in these bacteria after "remembering" certain stimuli

[_KPLR]

Just imagine the cells having flashbacks

[FerrariKing]

The question is can bacteria pass a course in Microbiology.

[gravijta]

I like to think the bacteria in my gut can remember different foods. They seem to get really excited when I eat chicken!

[shanerooney]

Does *Muscle Hank's* muscles have muscle memory?
And if so, can he hold a conversation with them?

[dramforever]

The callout labels at 1:02 about resistant bacteria are incorrect/misleading. The white stuff are paper discs containing antibiotics, and the yellow in the background are E. coli. Transparent circles around the paper discs indicate E. coli that were killed and unable to reproduce into significant amounts to show up as yellow, and the sizes of the circles indicate the bacteria's strength of resistance. The blue lines, however, imply that the paper discs are bacteria.

According to the file description, it is a picture of 'Antibiotic resistance tests; the bacteria in the culture on the left are sensitive to the antibiotics contained in the white paper discs. The bacteria on the right are resistant to most of the antibiotics.' I believe this means there are only two types of E. coli involved, one for each Petri dish, instead of one per white circle.

[madmonkee]

I'm so glad that you know / SciShow knows the singular of bacteria. I was beginning to give up hope.

[JohnSmith-tdhd]

Bacteria have some kind of memory that can even be passed onto decedents?! I am switching sides.

[TommoCarroll]

They probably just use a notes app on their *CELL PHONE*, it’s the 21st century way 😉

[stopyourranting]

Don’t believe it. Me and my bacteria reminisce about “Back in the day” all the time.

[rbfreitas]

Awesome!!! It sheds more light on how evolution might have happened!

[SpaceDwarfNova]

This idea kinda freaks me out but is interesting at the same time. Bacteria that can remember seems like a double edged sword, it can either help or hurt us depending on the situation

[richardstevens]

Bacteria can hear other bacteria screaming.

[Rationalific]

I gotta say that although I'm a big fan of Darwin and Wallace, I've also been a fan of Lamarck and thought he has gotten criticized far too much, even though he was on to a lot, and much farther along than most. And with this epigenetic stuff being passed to descendants, I think he has gotten a bit of vindication as well, at least on some scale.

[einsteinwasright]

Big mistakes: the slide at 59 seconds into the video has a caption that is pointing to the wrong places. The antibiotic resistant colonies are those that continue to expand outward and grow even though the antibiotic is in the white disc in the middle, but your caption points to the inhibited colony locations and asserts that THEY are antibiotic resistant!


Also the new emergence of antibiotic resistant mutations has been shown to be non-random. There is an enhanced mutation rate in the genes whose products are affected by the antibiotic, but not a general increase in random mutations. Presumably this occurs because the DNA for those genes has to repeatedly unwound (which unavoidably involved cutting one strand), transcribed, and then re-round, and when this happens thousands of times a higher rate of mutations occur in the affected genes. Most mutations are neutral, many are disadvantageous so they will be selected against, and the occasional mutation is advantageous so they will be selected for. This has been repeatedly shown by careful laboratory experiments carried out with cloned colonies grown for a long time in the presence of sub-lethal concentrations of the antibiotic. The members of the clone are unable to transfer any resistance factor from another bacterium because they are grown in isolation.

[sylendraws]

I'm pretty sure the average bacteria has more brain cells than me.

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

What is needed is an understanding of how the future forms out of the past! Some people say water has a memory!

[jean-pierredevent]

Now a lot of funding should be done to determine how they store memories because it could be important for knowing more about our brain too. How hard it can be to find something, there is only one cell.

[tevtsaca]

This "memory" experiment sounds a lot like selection for random mutants in a population