From Eureka, our new science and
environment magazine

As temperatures rise and ice melts, it has become clear that Man’s attempt to impose his will on Nature has gone awry. A new breed of scientists is beginning to approach our myriad problems from a new, humbler perspective; how, they ask, can we learn from Nature and borrow some of its extraordinary inventiveness in the fight against climate change.

The deep ocean is an unlikely source of inspiration for one project, which aims to make our cities alive and glowing. The plan sounds almost biblical; the lighting of the world from a multitude of fish.

Dr Rachel Armstrong, an architectural researcher from University College London, wants to transform buildings from being sterile, inert objects into entities that interact and evolve with the natural environment. She sees this as the fulfilment of what architects have always seen as the purpose of their work. “We’ve likened the city to an organism, but so far it has been a symbolic description. In the future, architecture will be literally alive,” she said.

Imagine the cityscape of the future. Forget skyscrapers studded with undimmed lights. Instead, think of crystal whites and luminous blues forging the city’s silhouette. Picture a city that sucks in carbon and uses bacteria harvested from dead fish to light the darkness. The city as a living character will no longer be a literary conceit, but a reality. From metaphor to concrete in one generation.

One of her projects starts with a simple premise. Leave a fish rotting in a bowl of water for long enough and it will begin to glow. The light comes from bacteria in the fish. In certain species, such as the flashlight fish and the anglerfish, a symbiotic relationship with this bacteria, Vibrio phosphoreum, allows the fish to glow and flicker in the deep ocean. The flashlight fish carries the bacteria in pouches beneath its eyes, which it opens to show off the glimmering organisms or closes to hide them, depending on whether it wishes to lure in prey or evade predators. But how have scientists leapt from flashes of light in the sea to a new vision for our cities? Welcome to the world of nanoarchitecture.

With her colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Armstrong is focusing on “grunge” solutions to global warming: technologies that are cheap and relatively simple. We’ve already seen a sliver of this idea. Steven Chu, the United States Secretary of Energy, is an advocate of the use of whitewash on our houses. “If you take all the buildings in the world and make their roofs white and you do this uniformly . . . it’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years,” he told a meeting in London earlier this year.

But Armstrong and her peers have ideas that reach far beyond whitewash. One intriguing possibility is the use of bioluminescent bacteria, organisms that give off a blue-green glow, as low-energy urban lighting. In the US, urban lighting accounts for more than 8 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption. The sides of buildings and billboards could be covered in sparkling bacteria, such as Vibrio phosphoreum — the fish bacteria. This produces light automatically when a pigment contained in the bacteria called luciferin, from the Latin meaning light bringer, reacts with oxygen in air or water. At present, the light emitted is not strong enough to illuminate a street, but scientists believe that it could be engineered to do so. Another possibility is using bacteria to metabolise carbon dioxide through photosynthesis so that the bacterial coating would effectively eat up carbon dioxide by turning sunlight into energy.

“When dealing with climate change we don’t always have to invent something new, we have to think very cleverly about what we already have,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t take a massive leap of imagination to envisage how much more useful the surfaces of our buildings could become if covered in bacteria that glow in the dark or remove pollutants from the atmosphere.”

Choosing which bacteria to use would be the easy part, according to Armstrong, as scientists have already identified numerous common species that carry out these functions. She is now looking at the possibility of using cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, to capture carbon dioxide.

What remains to be addressed, however, is how best to cultivate such organisms on the surfaces of our houses, offices and schools. Armstrong views this challenge as a form of gardening. “Bacterial gardens don’t really exist and that’s what we need to create,” she says.

Simon Park, a microbiologist at the University of Surrey, already has some experience of bacterial gardening. He has been exploring the use of naturally bioluminescent bacteria in art, using Vibrio phosphoreum to make dazzling blue abstract displays. Park cultivates the bacteria by placing them in agar gel in petri dishes and providing them with salty water, which replicates a marine environment, and glycerol, on which they feed. Park’s art installations normally last for a few days before the bacteria run out of food and gradually fade to darkness, but if fed continually the displays could be permanent, he said.

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