Bacteria in a Petri dish become “color negative”!

Bacteria in a Petri dish become “color negative”!

Now, let’s enjoy some “petri dish painting”. Among them is Pixel Mario jumping up a water pipe:

Colored Melons and Fruits:

And colorful lizards in abstract style:

Drawing on petri dishes is not uncommon. It has long been a favorite activity of microbiologists, and there are some excellent ones. However, these petri dishes are fundamentally different from their predecessors: instead of being painted, they are images of bacteria that have been “sensitized” to light, like a film.

That’s what MIT’s Voigt lab is showing the world. Escherichia coli bacteria growing on these dishes have a special skill: they react to red, green, and blue light and produce pigments that correspond to each color. When enough of these pigments accumulate, we see these color images.

Of course, ordinary E. coli bacteria don’t have this ability at all, and turning them into living “color negates” requires sophisticated gene editing. In all, the researchers inserted 18 genes into the color-sensitive bacteria, including those responsible for sensing light, producing pigments and regulating it. This transformation, it can be said, is a big project.

Researchers at Voigt’s lab have been doing this since about 12 years ago. In 2005, they succeeded in turning the bacteria into a “black and white plate” on a petri dish. At that time, only four genes were introduced. Now they have implemented much more complex features.

This is the black and white version

So, is bacterial color film of any use? It didn’t, but it showed the new potential of biotechnology.

Here, the researchers managed to manipulate the bacteria with three different colors of light to produce different colors of pigment. Using similar techniques, they may one day be able to make the bacteria perform even more complex tasks. Bacteria already help people make things like drugs, and in large-scale production, controlling them with light would be a convenient way.

But all in all, Mario looks cute on a petri dish. The researchers also came up with a name for these colorful photosensitive bacteria: disco bacteria. Do you feel the sparkling color effects…

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