Encapsulated Bacterial Sensors News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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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 a ....

Farren Isaacs , Abdul Latif Jameel , Hyunwoo Yuk , Tzu Chieh Tang , Xinyue Liu , Timothy Lu , Xuanhe Zhao , Alexis Rovner , Kevin Yehl , Yale School Of Medicine , National Institutes Of Health , Harvard Medical School , National Science Foundation , Institute For Soldier Nanotechnologies , Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , University Of Pennsylvania , Food Systems Laboratory , Us Army Research Office , Us Office Of Naval Research , Nature Chemical , Eleonore Tham Phd , Cesar De La Fuente Nunez , Yale School , National Institutes , Naval Research , Research Office ,