Friday 25 April 2014

Engineering bacteria to act as sensors

Synthetic biologists programmed Escherichia coli to sense and record environmental stimuli, such as the antibiotic anhydrotetracycline, in the mouse gastrointestinal tract. This way, E. coli can be engineered into living diagnostics capable of non-destructively probing the mammalian gut.

The research has been published in PNAS, in a paper titled "Programmable bacteria detect and record an environmental signal in the mammalian gut".
Posted by Tim Sandle

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