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posted by martyb on Friday December 01 2017, @01:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the CRISPR-critters dept.

World's Smallest "Tape Recorder" Is Built From Microbes

Through a few clever molecular hacks, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have converted a natural bacterial immune system into a microscopic data recorder, laying the groundwork for a new class of technologies that use bacterial cells for everything from disease diagnosis to environmental monitoring.

The researchers modified an ordinary laboratory strain of the ubiquitous human gut microbe Escherichia coli, enabling the bacteria to not only record their interactions with the environment but also time-stamp the events.

"Such bacteria, swallowed by a patient, might be able to record the changes they experience through the whole digestive tract, yielding an unprecedented view of previously inaccessible phenomena," says Harris Wang, assistant professor in the Departments of Pathology & Cell Biology and Systems Biology at CUMC and senior author on the new work, described in today's issue of Science. Other applications could include environmental sensing and basic studies in ecology and microbiology, where bacteria could monitor otherwise invisible changes without disrupting their surroundings.

It seems to be capable of recording chemical data, or perhaps something like exposure to light (allowing you to figure out how many times an office light is switched on, perhaps). It's a potential future surveillance tool.

Video (1m27s).

Multiplex recording of cellular events over time on CRISPR biological tape (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0958) (DX)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 01 2017, @05:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 01 2017, @05:09AM (#603804)

    The CIA will be smearing shit on the door handles.