From the May 2004 Scientific American Magazine | 1 comments

Synthetic Life ( Preview )

Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines

Both devices were constructed by inserting selected DNA sequences into Escherichia coli, a normally innocuous bacterium in the human gut. The two performed very different functions, however. Michael Elowitz and Stanislaus Leibler, then at Princeton University, assembled three interacting genes in a way that made the E. coli blink predictably, like microscopic Christmas tree lights. Meanwhile James J. Collins, Charles R. Cantor and Timothy S. Gardner of Boston University made a genetic toggle switch. A negative feedback loop--two genes that interfere with each other--allows the toggle circuit to flip between two stable states. It effectively endows each modified bacterium with a rudimentary digital memory.

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