Chris S - What have you done?
to create a
of bacteria that's able to respond to
. The way that we do this is…If you look in a pond, a dirty pond, you'll see a green sludge. That sludge sometimes is bacteria, and the
it's green is because it is able to do photosynthesis. And so it has to be able to see light. So, we took a
from that bacteria that’s in that pond and we modified it so that it works in a bacteria that
is living in your gut, that doesn’t have to see light. (E. coli?) That’s right, E. coli. By bringing in this gene and doing a couple other modifications to the
of E. coli, we made it so that individual E. coli cells are able to see light.
a light on them, what does it do to the bacteria?
of protein, which is a molecule, much of the bacteria is made of protein, and this protein is on the surface of the bacterium. It's special in that it has a chemical that, when light is shined onto that chemical, then it changes the
of the protein. This change in shape of the protein is recognized by the bacteria, and this
on a gene. And so in this way, you can
shining light on the bacteria to the activation of a gene.
of applications. For example, in thinking about
complex materials—it’s very hard to work with proteins, just from a
perspective—and it would be
if you were able to print proteins with a very high resolution. We are thinking about using this system in order to have
bacteria turn on the production of proteins that maybe produce a particular
material like
, or possibly do some sort of interesting
.
megapixels.
tiny resolution you can work at. You can make really, really fine structures.
on a
.
. What we're using is known as a
of E. coli. This differs from
strains in that almost
% of its genome is
. Specifically, this strain of bacteria is
in the lab because it's a very
strain.
, everything that’s sort of
or
has been removed.