Toying with biological systems
Bacteria don’t normally take photographs. Nor do they attack tumor cells or produce chemicals. But with some help from biological engineer Chris Voigt, they can do all that and more. Voigt, who joined MIT’s faculty in July as an associate professor of biological engineering, likes to tinker with bacteria and other microbes to get them to perform myriad useful tasks that nature never intended — an approach known as synthetic biology. For example, to develop their “bacterial camera,” Voigt and his students inserted a light-detecting sensor from an alga into the bacterium E. coli, coupled with a gene that causes the bacterium to make a black pigment. A sheet of these bacteria acts as the “film,” and when a stencil is laid over the film and light shone upon it, an image of the stencil forms on the sheet of bacteria.Likewise, his tumor-targeting E. coli incorporate genes from other bacteria...