Living Photos Use Bacteria as Pixels

BrainBlogger writes "Scientists at UC San Francisco have engineered bacteria to create living photographs that weigh in at 100 megapixels per square inch. The photos were created by projecting light on "biological film" -- billions of genetically engineered E. coli growing in dishes of agar."

Students discovery?

[dada21]

Obligatory Coral Cache Link [nyud.net]

Pretty detailed tiny image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How many noodly appendage comments will we see?

With the growing number of sequenced microbes, we can search through nature's large trove of tools to find ones that fit the job," Levskaya said. "In our case, searching for light-sensing domains led us to use a photosynthetic bacterium." The students produced ghostlike, living photos of many things, including themselves and their advisors

I wonder how far they are from being able to take a huge image of a processor chip pathway and use these microbes to lay out an eating path for another microbe to create cheaper chips. I'm guessing it isn't realistic in the near future, but as the progression builds towards more "consistent" bacteria, maybe we'll see more aggressive use of these discoveries for profitable reasons.

That's my biggest question -- is anyone seeing private R&D scientists investing time and money in engineered bacteria that will be protected by patents or other IP protections? It's pretty amazing that TFA's discovery was by students.

Re:Students discovery?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that amazing to see discoveries come from students in Academia.

I would be more amazed to see a company develop something like this. These days, it seems bio-business works by putting a protection of patents around academic discoveries.

why is this interesting?

[penguin-collective]

E. Coli genetic engineering has been around for many years. Creating light sensitive strains, strains that make pigments, etc. is roughly appropriate for college level biology. I suppose it's kind of neat that engineers have taken notice, but it really is textbook stuff.

In fact, even more simply, since the pigment was present/absent based on whether the bacteria were growing in the light, you can repeat this experiment at home: use any organism using chlorophyll for photosynthesis and grow it in patterned light: you'll get a "photograph" in green/yellow. That's an experiment even elementary school students do.

You've got to give it to these people, though: they are excellent salespeople. Getting away with such trivialities as "engineering" and endowing bacteria with "new skills" takes both guts and skills.

Hellooooo blogvertisement

[SuperBanana]

"Adapted from a press release" indeed. WHOIS for brainblog.com:

Administrative Contact: Elabridi:, Mounir [e-mail] Maroc Internet SARL 221 Boulevard Zerktouni Casablanca, 20010 Morocco 17202492499 Fax --

Third google hit on Mr. Elabridi's name is:

"Maroc Internet - Management Mounir Elabridi, a globally recognized innovator in Internet marketing, founded Maroc Internet in 2002. Mr Elabridi brings to this venture a proven track ...

Well, now how about that.

The domain name servers for the domain are NS1/NS2.BENSULLIVAN.COM. Mr. Sullivan lives at 4404 Price St, Los Angeles, CA 90027- about a 15 minute drive from University California Los Angeles. It's a stretch, but also an interesting coincidence.

Re:why is this interesting?

[swiftstream]

Uhh, in case you didn't RTFA, this _is_ college level biology. The team that genetically engineered the bacteria was led by a grad student.

Re:Students discovery?

[ottffssent]

These bacteria are way too big to be of any use in modern photolithography. Assuming each one's square, and there's 1 per pixel, each bacterium takes up an area of about 6.5 square microns (1 100-millionth of a square inch). For comparison, the smallest production SRAM cell I can find is .25 square microns, and contains 6 transistors. That makes these bacteria 150x as big as a transistor, and even larger when compared to the features that make up the transistors and connect them together.

Now, in situations where you want a physically large product, such as the circuitry to drive an LCD, biology holds huge promise.

He thought of it first...

[sokweman]

Interestingly, the idea of using microbes to create an image is not new. Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club by virtue of paintings he made by growing different colored bacteria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming [wikipedia.org]