E.Coli turns film star
OT news / p2pnet: The E. coli bug is usually associated with food poisoning. But now it now has a new, much friendlier, role.
Film star.
Students at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Texas, Austin, have used it to create the first living bacterial photographs.
The images and a bacterial camera were produced as part of MIT’s intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, says the UCSF.
Anselm Levskaya, a UCSF biophysics graduate student, led the effort to build the bug while the University of Texas team figured out how to create the photographs, it states.
The project won “best part” for the genetically engineered light receptor.
“E. coli live in the dark confines of the human gut and wouldn`t normally sense light, so the students had to engineer the unicellular machines to work as a photo-capturing surface,” says the UCSF.
“Levskaya and [UCSF professor Chris] Voigt first engineered the bacteria to sense light by adding a light receptor protein from a photosynthetic blue-green algae to the E. coli cell surface. The microbe`s metabolism was modified to produce a chemical that gave the protein sensor the ability to see light in its new microbial host.”
The story is being published in this week`s issue of Nature (November 24, 2005).
Also read:-
University of California, San Francisco – Scientists engineer bacteria to create living photographs, February 23, 2005
