Science Focus
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If only it were easier to monitor and record what happens in our guts, the source of those feelings we can't explain but know instinctively are right. A wide variety of health conditions, from infections to cancer, take place out of sight in our abdomen. Sure, you could have a capsule endoscopy—swallow a camera-in-a-pill that takes photos of your intestines and sends them to a recorder you wear around your waist—but cameras have limitations. They can only record visuals of what's there, and they can't respond to changes, like the addition of a drug or a toxin.
Now, researchers at Harvard have engineered bacteria that can sense an environmental signal in a mouse gut and then report back about it. They hope that these bacteria will provide a nondestructive way to diagnose, and maybe even treat, intestinal maladies.
Synthetic biologists have generated a number of genetic "memory switches." The one used here relies on the different phases in the lifestyle of a virus that attacks the bacteria, called bacteriophage lambda. The virus has two distinct approaches: lysogenic phase, in which it just lurks in the bacterial cell, co-opting its DNA replication machinery; and the lytic phase, in which the phage destroys the bacterial cell it is infecting.
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