To show off the powers of synthetic biology, researchers have engineered a primitive kind of colour vision into bacteria — and got the microbes to paint pictures of what they see.
The genetically modified Escherichia coli can sense red, green and blue (RGB) light, and they respond by producing a pigment of the corresponding colour. Projecting light on to a Petri dish of the bacteria leads them to create colour ‘photographs’, albeit ones with an exposure time of 18 hours.
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The RGB system uses 18 genes, including three that encode light-sensitive proteins. It “goes way beyond the original black and white system in terms of complexity”, says Pamela Silver, a systems biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
[According to] Christopher Voigt, who led the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the wider aim is to find ways to turn many types of gene on and off in bacteria using flashes of light of different colors. Researchers could then, for example, make the bacteria produce complex molecules on demand by using light to stop and start reactions.[Read the original study here (behind paywall)]
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