A team of researchers announced Wednesday that they had created photographs of themselves by programming the E. coli bacteria to make pictures in the same way Kodak film produces images.
The eerie yellow and black photographs are the latest advancement in "synthetic biology", a research area launched largely by chemists and engineers intent on manipulating bacteria and other microorganisms into behaving like micro-machines. The aim of this is to create new, powerful and inexpensive ways to produce drugs, alternatives to fossil fuels, and even perform mathematical functions.
Chris Voigt, a University of California, San Francisco researcher said "There is kind of a hacker culture behind all of this." Voigt is the senior editor on the bacteria-as-film paper in the publication Nature.
Voigt and colleagues took the common E. coli bacteria and added a light-sensitive gene from algae that caused a black pigment to be produced only when the bacteria are in the dark.
The organisms, best known for its part in food poisoning, were then spread on a petri dish resembling a large sheet of grease-proof paper and placed in a temperature-controlled incubator. A high-powered slide projector cast photographic images through a hole on top of the incubator, exposing some of the bacteria to light.
Dark parts of the 35mm slides block the light from hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. The parts exposed to the light then remain the yellowish colour of the modified E. coli bacterium.
The result is a permanent image equivalent to a 100 megapixels digital image. In other words, an image roughly 10 times sharper than high-end printers.
The work, though, isn't intended for commercial markets, especially since it takes about two hours to produce a single image.
"They aren't going to put Kodak out of business any time soon," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology synthetic biologist Drew Endy. Instead, the creation is to be used to control microorganisms using light. The idea is to create a genetically engineered cell that will only become active and perform a pre-designated task when a laser is shined upon it.
The field of synthetic biology strives to create complex biological systems that function as logically and reliably as computers, a step up from genetic engineering where a single gene is spliced into bacteria and other cells to manufacture drugs.
Bioethicists and national security experts in the US, however, are concerned that synthetic biologists are inventing technology that could be used by terrorists. There is also the fear of an innocent mistake where the newly created organisms could be transported outside the lab and potentially create havoc.
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