Do bacteria use electricity?
Yes. All cells need energy to stay alive. Bacteria use energy from metabolism to build an electrical voltage across their cell membrane. They then use this membrane voltage to drive chemical reactions, transport molecules, move, and signal. We study how these electrical states change, what they do, and how they can be measured and controlled.
What is bioelectricity?
Electrical signalling is well known in nerves, brains and muscles. But every living cell also regulates the distribution of electrical charge across its membrane. This creates a voltage difference across the membrane, called the membrane potential. This is a basic feature of life.
Bioelectricity is the study of how living cells use membrane voltage and electrical signals to regulate cellular processes, coordinate behaviour, and communicate.
Why does bioelectricity matter?
A thin membrane defines the boundary between inside and outside of a cell. The cell actively moves ions across this membrane and controls which ions are allowed to cross. The resulting electrical and chemical differences store energy.
Bacteria use this stored energy to make ATP, transport molecules, move, maintain their internal environment and respond to changing conditions. The electrical state of the membrane is therefore not just a side effect of life: it is closely connected to how the cell functions.
These processes also matter beyond basic biology. They influence biofilm formation, responses to antimicrobial treatment, and our ability to engineer bacteria for biotechnology.
Can bacteria communicate electrically?
Bacteria are often thought of as isolated single cells, but in nature many live in communities. They can influence one another through chemicals, metabolites, direct contact, and changes to their shared environment.
Electrical interactions provide another possibility. In some bacterial biofilms, ion movements can alter the local electrical environment and affect neighbouring cells. Work on Bacillus subtilis, for example, has shown that potassium-channel activity can contribute to signals that travel across a community.
This does not mean that bacteria have brains or neurons. But it raises a broader question: what are the evolutionary origins of bioelectrical signalling?
Can we measure and control bacterial electricity?
Measuring voltage dynamics in bacteria is challenging because bacterial cells are much smaller than the cells typically studied in classical electrophysiology. Instead of inserting electrodes into individual cells, researchers often use fluorescent probes, microscopy, and controlled perturbations to track changes in membrane potential.
We are also interested in going beyond measurement. We use electrical, chemical and optical approaches to perturb membrane potential and observe how cells respond.
This connects fundamental biophysics with engineering biology: understanding a biological state is one step, but being able to measure, predict and control it opens the possibility of using that state as an engineering variable.
What do we still not understand?
Many basic questions remain open. How is membrane voltage generated and regulated under different conditions? Which ions carry electrical responses? When does an electrical change contain useful information for the cell? How does one cell's electrical state affect another? And can these dynamics be used to detect or control bacterial behaviour?
These questions sit at the intersection of microbiology, biophysics, and engineering biology. Bacteria provide a powerful simple living system in which to test them experimentally, while also offering opportunities for useful applications.
Want to go deeper?
The papers below discuss bacterial membrane potential and electrical signalling in more technical detail.