zen_tom

I was thinking of industrial applications in the chemical industries - these things are basically tiny triggerable chemical factories.

So you can use them to produce chemicals in ways and places that you couldn't do before, or where the introduction of bacteria might cause problems.

One thing might be a special form of plastic seeded with these things that liquefies in the presence of an enzyme. Add another enzyme and the plastic hardens again. So in the recycling centre, you spray the enzyme onto the rubbish, the plasitc dissolves and is collected in a pit on the floor, cleaned, sent to the bottle factory, poured into moulds, given a dose of the hardening enzyme and pop, there's a new bottle.

Or you could develop cells that secrete calcium carbonates (borrowed from corals, or shelled molluscs) in order to build (grow) structures that wouldn't require workmen except for wiring or plumbing etc.

Later versions of these cells might be able to change shape in response to an electrical signal, the way muscle cells do. These types of cells could be used in machenery that mimiced the mechanics of the body.

The possibilities are pretty vast - I suspect though that currently they are difficult to produce in large numbers - a problem that might be solvable if they were built to self-replicate in addition to their other functions. What might happen then? A whole new branch of life?