A new engineered strain of E. coli could deliver updates on the status of our gut health. The technique which turned E. coli into living diagnostic reporters has been demonstrated in the mouse gut and reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It could lead to a radically new screening tool for human gut health. The process of turning E. coli into gut reporters was to insert a well-known genetic switch that flips when it senses a specific environmental cue. This switch confers on the cells the ability to remember what they sense for up to a week — long enough for scientists to recover fecal samples and test whether the switch has flipped. In the schematic pictured here, engineered probiotic E. coli have colonized the mammalian intestine and remember exposure to an environmental signal, which is indicated by the cells turning blue in color. Read more here: bit.ly/1dl5qtW Image credit: Jonathan Kotula, Harvards Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School Publication: Programmable bacteria detect and record an environmental signal in the mammalian gut. PNAS, 2014 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321321111
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 14:40:20 +0000
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