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Student scientists create living bacterial photographs

based on whether it was growing in a light or dark place in the dish. The resulting images are a collection of all the bacteria responding to the pattern of light.

E. coli are found naturally 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.

UCSF biophysics graduate student Anselm Levskaya and his adviser, Dr. 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. They hooked the light receptor up to a sensor in E. coli that normally senses salt concentration. Instead of sensing salt, the bacteria could sense light.

The light receptor was then connected to a system in the bacteria that makes pigments. When light strikes the new receptor, it turns off a gene that ultimately controls the production of a colored compound in the bacteria.

The Texas students, including Tabor and Aaron Chevalier, realized that after optimizing the pigments and agar growth media, these bacteria could be used to convert light images shined onto the bacteria into biochemical prints. To create the photographs, the Texas students used a unique light projector largely designed and built by Chevalier, a physics undergraduate.

The device projects the pattern of light--like an image of one of the Texas students' co-advisers, Dr. Andy "Escherichia" Ellington--onto the dish of bacteria growing at body temperature in an incubator. After about 12-15 hours of exposure (the time it takes for a bacterial population to grow and fill the Petri dish), the light projector is removed.

What's left is a living photograph.

Bacteria in the lighted regions of the Petri dish don't produce the pigment and appear light. Those in the dark regions produce pigment and appear dark.

The biological technologies these students are buil
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Source:University of Texas at Austin


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