Nanotubes — tiny hollow carbon filaments about one 10-thousandth the diameter of a human hair — are 100 times as strong as steel and one-sixth as dense. They can conduct electricity better than copper and have been proposed as the basis for everything from elevator cables that could lift payloads into Earth orbit to computers smaller than human cells.

Thin films of carbon nanotubes deposited on transparent plastic can also serve as a surface on which cells can grow. And as researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Rice University suggest, such nanotube films could potentially serve as an electrical interface between living tissue and prosthetic devices or biomedical instruments.

As far as I know, we’re the first group to show that you can have some kind of electrical communication between these two things, by stimulating cells through our transparent conductive layer, said Todd Pappas of UTMB’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.

The project is reported in the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.