Bioengineers have redesigned how harmless E. coli bacteria »talk» to each other. The new genetic circuit could become a useful new tool for synthetic biologists who, as a field, are looking for ways to better control the bacteria they engineer to perform all sorts of tasks, including drug delivery, bioproduction of valuable compounds, and environmental sensing.

What’s new about the UC San Diego control strategy of the E. coli that serve as workhorses of synthetic biology? The bacterial cells within a population are engineered to be unable to communicate with each other through chemical signals unless one particular external molecule is present.

This work is published in the March 4, 2020 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

«We hope that this system can increase control and safety of synthetic genetic circuits, and therefore facilitate their transition to real life applications,» said Arianna Miano, a UC San Diego bioengineering PhD student and the first author on the Nature Communications paper.

This work is from the UC San Diego lab led by Jeff Hasty, who is a professor of bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and of biology in the Division of Biological Sciences.

Traditionally, synthetic biologists use native bacterial communication systems, known as quorum sensing, to control the bacterial communities they use for tasks such as targeted drug delivery.

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