Genetic engineering creates a ‘telephone’ for your microbiome
With more than 1,000 species of bacteria identified in the human gut, understanding this incredibly diverse biological ecosystem can impact health and disease. As they do, scientists may be setting the stage for creating synthetic microbiomes that can record information about the state of the gut in real time, or report the presence of disease. Bacteria are routinely genetically engineered in labs. Yet little has been known about how the different strains communicate with each other, or whether it is even possible to create signaling pathways that would allow information to pass between them. Now, researchers from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have successfully engineered a genetic signal-transmission system in which a molecular signal sent by Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria in response to an environmental cue can be received and recorded by E. coli in a mouse gut. The finding brings scientists a...