The Concept

As a group of students from Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, we have set out to genetically reprogram the chemotactic behaviour of E. coli. More details on this idea will be published here at a later stage.

Potential Applications

This project could have important implications in the fields of medicine, mining and water treatment. One would be able to send a "bacterial-messenger" out to detect certain substances which can act as chemoattractants - such as disease biomarkers or elemental metals. Via chemotaxis, the messenger E.coli will be able to search an area and locate the source of the chemoattractant. It will then travel back to the starting point to report back on its findings. Based on the information provided by these "messenger bacteria", and through recording the time taken for the bacteria to return, a probability density map can be generated, from which the location of the chemoattractant source can be determined. A potential application in diagnostics could be the non-invasive detection and localisation of cancerous cells in the colon, for example.