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By sealing bacteria in tough yet porous, outer casings, environmental scientists could use these organisms as safe and effective detectors of environmental contaminants like heavy metals.
Developing a strain of engineered bacteria that can effectively be used as a sensor to detect contaminants in environments has been a hot scientific topic for years. Bacteria created this way could help researchers in the vital task of tracking changes in pollution levels over wide geographical areas.
Yet, whilst genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs) are great for a wide range of essential applications, including environmental sensing, containing them and preventing them from growing in the environment has been a major stumbling block to their wider use.
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Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT
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In recent years, scientists have developed many strains of engineered bacteria that can be used as sensors to detect environmental contaminants such as heavy metals. If deployed in the natural environment, these sensors could help scientists track how pollutant levels change over time, over a wide geographic area.
MIT engineers have now devised a way to make this kind of deployment safer, by encasing bacterial sensors in a tough hydrogel shell that prevents them from escaping into the environment and potentially spreading modified genes to other organisms.
“Right now there are a lot of whole-cell biosensors being developed, but applying them in the real world is a challenge because we don’t want any genetically modified organisms to be able to exchange genetic material with wild-type microbes,” says MIT graduate student Tzu-Chieh Tang, one of the lead authors of the new stu
6 RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. Kombucha tea, a trendy fermented beverage, inspired researchers to develop a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the kombucha mother used to ferment tea.
With Army funding, using this mixture, also called a SCOBY, or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, engineers at MIT and Imperial College London produced cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants and self-healing materials.
The team also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the cellulose, creating living materials that could be used to purify water for Soldiers in the field or make smart packaging materials that can detect damage.