Bacteria Can Take Pictures of Themselves
By PAUL ELIAS, AP Biotechnology Writer Wed Nov 23, 3:40 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO - The notorious
E. coli bug made its film debut Wednesday. That's when researchers at the
University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas announced
in the journal Nature that they had created photographs of themselves by
programming the bacteria - best known for outbreaks of food poisoning - to make
pictures in much the same way Kodak film produces images.
It's the latest advance in "synthetic biology," a disputed research movement
launched largely by engineers and chemists bent on genetically manipulating
microscopic bugs into acting like tiny machines, creating new, powerful and
inexpensive ways to make drugs, plastics and even alternatives to fossil fuel.
The field seeks to go beyond traditional genetic engineering feats where a
single gene is spliced into bacteria and other cells to manufacture drugs.
Synthetic biologists are trying to create complex systems that function as
logically and reliably as computers.
Mainstream biologists, however, scoff that biology - life itself - is too
unpredictable and prone to genetic mutation to understand, let alone tame and
turn into miniature factories.
Bioethicists, meanwhile, fret that synthetic biologists are attempting to
create new living creatures and are inventing technology that can readily be
used by terrorists.
Still, a growing number of engineers are jumping into the nascent field, whose
chief goals include breaking down microbes and other living things into smaller
components and reassembling those parts into useful machines.
"There is kind of a hacker culture behind all of this," said Chris Voigt, a
University of California, San Francisco researcher who, at 29, was the senior
author on the bacteria-as-film paper in Nature.
Voigt and colleagues took from algae light-sensitive genes that emit black
compounds and spliced them into a batch of E. coli bacteria. The organisms were
then spread on a petri dish that resembles a cookie sheet and placed in an
incubator. A high-powered projector cast photographic images of the researchers
through a hole on top of the incubator, exposing some of the bacteria to light.
The result: Ghostly images like traditional black-and-white photographs of the
researchers responsible for the invention, at a resolution Voigt said was about
100 megapixels, or 10 times sharper than high-end printers.
The work, though, isn't intended for commercial markets.
"They aren't going to put Kodak out of business any time soon," said
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Drew Endy, a leading synthetic
biologist.
Instead, the creation will be used as a sensor to start and stop more complex
genetic engineering experiments. The idea is to create a genetically engineered
cell that lays dormant until a laser is shined on it, prompting it into action.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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