The bar of the future may have all-organic brews on tap and blinking neon signs in the window made with millions of bacterial cells that periodically glow in unison.

The same "living neon sign" technology could also be used to help brewers and other folks monitor environmental pollutants in water such as arsenic, according to research published online Sunday in the journal Nature.

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The breakthrough involved attaching a fluorescent protein to bacteria engineered with biological clocks, and then synchronizing the clocks of thousands of bacteria within a colony to create a so-called biopixel.

Thousands of these biopixels, each an individual point of light like a pixel on a computer screen, are then synchronized so they all glow in unison to create a sign.

The largest signs made so far are about the size of a paperclip, according to the researchers working on the technology at the University of California at San Diego. 

Path to success
The work started with engineering a biological clock into a single bacterium, explained Jeff Hasty, a professor of biology and bioengineering at the university.

These engineered clocks are attached to a fluorescent protein that flashes on and off. 

Next, Hasty's team synchronized all the clocks in a bacterial colony via what's called quorum sensing, which is a way bacteria communicate with each other using molecular signals.

This made it so that "an entire colony would flash in synchrony," Hasty explained to me Monday.

A single bacterial colony is 10s of microns in diameter — about the size of a pixel, hence biopixel.

"If you want to get out to the centimeter-length scale, this quorum sensing won't work because it is too slow; you would get something that looks like waves," he said.

To get over that hurdle, the team connected a gene that codes for hydrogen peroxide gas vapor to the biological clock. The gas vapor is used to communicate and synchronize the colonies.

"When the clock goes on, you get a pulse of vapor and that pulse of vapor then goes to a neighboring colony and that's what communicates the signal. And when the clock goes off, the vapor goes off," Hasty said.

In the final system, quorum sensing is used for signaling at the colony level, the gas vapor signal is used to synchronize across colonies.

Environmental sensors
The researchers have turned the blinking bacteria into a sign that spells out UCSD and could, for example, get to the scale where it could spell your favorite brand of beer for display in a bar window, Hasty said.

More practical applications will come in the environmental sensor market. As a proof of concept, the team created a biosensor that detects levels of arsenic, a heavy metal, in water. The more arsenic detected, the slower the sensor blinks. 

These sensors can be built in the lab for less than $100, Hasty said, and each sensor lasts for weeks at a time.

For now, the researchers are trying to figure out the limits of scale for the technology. 

"How many cells can we get in a centimeter-length scale to increase the signal?" Hasty said. "And then, how much can we increase this length scale to get something that is even macroscopic?"

Imagine, for example, a giant flashing "living neon sign" hovering over the outfield seats advertising the marquee sponsor for the Colorado Rockies baseball team.

More on glowing life forms:

• Glowing bacteria encrypt codes
• Plants that glow on their own developed
• Bright bacteria wins synthetic biology competition
• Glow in the dark mushrooms discovered

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.  

Scientists are tweaking bacteria to send encrypted messages that can be shipped via snail mail on sheets of paper-like material called nitrocellulose.

The recipient grows the bacteria with a select cocktail of nutrients and other chemicals. Once grown, each microbe glows one of seven colors when exposed to the right kind of light. Different colored microbes are arranged to represent different letters and symbols. If you know the nutrient and chemical cocktail as well as the keys to the code, you can decipher the message.

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For an added layer of security, many glowing microbes can be sent along, but only those that survive a dose of a particular antibiotic will reveal the intended message when exposed to the right light. 

"There are several layers of encoding in the message," Manuel Palacios, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and lead author of a paper on the technique, told me today.

To prove the point, the team created a message that when exposed to ampicillin read "this is a bioencoded message from the walt lab at tufts university 2011." The drug kanamycin gave different glowing bacteria that encoded the message: "you have used the wrong cipher and the message is gibberish."

Palacios and his colleagues named this biological messaging steganography by printed arrays of microbes, or SPAM. They describe it in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The technology is rooted in funding from DARPA, the military's high-tech research agency, which suggests real-world spies could be communicating with messages encoded in arrays of glowing bugs. 

"I love that this triggers all this discussion about spies and stuff," Palacios noted, but said practical applications are more likely to be found in the biotech world.

For example, a biotech company that develops a high-yielding variety of genetically modified corn could use this technique to give the plant an easily-identifiable characteristic that thwarts attempts to steal it. 

Currently, biotech companies stamp the genetic code of their modified crops, but genetic sequencing in the lab is required to read the stamp.

"With this method, we are demonstrating that we can encode genetic information and we can decode it into something that just by looking at it you will be able to know what the message is," Palacios explained. 

In this case, the message isn't top secret. Rather it is not obvious. So, for example, a corn stalk could be engineered to carry a biobarcode that can identify the plant as proprietary.

"That's where we might be seeing an application in the future," Palacios said.

More on secret messages:

• Strange twists in a DNA message
• Plants that glow on their own developed
• Researchers store data in DNA bacteria
• Spy trick hides message in plain sight

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

 

 

Scientists have successfully added multiple "unnatural" amino acids to a strain of bacteria, a breakthrough on the path to genetically engineered microbes that create useful things for people such as life-saving medicines and biofuels.

"We are adding components to the bug so that the bug can do something that a natural bug usually can't do," Lei Wang at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies told me today. "We are trying to make it do new tricks."

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Amino acids are molecules built primarily from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. They assemble into various shapes and patterns to form the larger proteins. Proteins, in turn, carry out specific biological functions.

All life on Earth relies on a standard set of 20 amino acids. For years, researchers have genetically altered bacteria to perform certain tasks, such as produce the synthetic insulin diabetics use to regulate blood sugar levels. But until now, all such genetic engineering has relied on the 20 natural amino acids.

In the eyes of Wang, the world might be a better place if there were more building blocks available.

"If you can provide more building blocks, then you may be able to generate a new function for the proteins," he said. "And if you can create new functions for the proteins, then you may be able to synthesize new compounds using these proteins."

Examples of the potential compounds include drugs, industrial chemicals, and biofuels. 

Expanded genetic code
To do this, Wang's team created an essentially expanded genetic code for the bacteria, a strain of E. coli, with instructions to use multiple unnatural amino acids in the construction of proteins. 

The technology to put one unnatural amino acid at one place in the DNA has been around for about a decade, Wang said. The problem is that with just one position, "you cannot evolve anything, you cannot produce anything useful," he said. 

This limitation stemmed from that fact that bacteria produce another protein called release factor 1 (RF1) that stops the production of the protein containing the unnatural amino acid. To get around this, Wang's team removed RF1 and altered another protein, RF2, to keep the bug alive in the absence of RF1.

"We can now put unnatural amino acids at multiple places simultaneously and with very, very high efficiency … therefore you significantly increase your chance of generating new protein function and therefore generating new biosynthesis ability," he said. 

Complementary to 'synthetic life'
This approach to creating useful products with genetically enhanced bugs is complementary to efforts such as Craig Venter's well publicized effort to create synthetic lifeforms that could, potentially, produce biofuels, Wang said.

That effort, Wang explained, essentially attempts to reorganize and optimize the natural components of the genome to "make it better." The Salk team's effort gives the bug new building blocks. 

"They sort of help each other out," Wang said of the two approaches. "What they achieve can help us and what we helped achieve here can also help them."

Both approaches along with other efforts to genetically engineer microbes to produce useful products such as butanol may one day allow us to fill up our cars with fuel made by the genetically enhanced bugs or visit the pharmacy for a new class of drugs.

"We are not there yet, but that is exactly what we want to do in the next stage," Wang said.

More stories on engineered bacteria:

• Bacteria turned into biofuel factories
• Bacteria rebuilt to make oil
• It's alive! Artificial DNA controls life
• First synthetic life form holds promise, peril
• Synthetic life could help humans colonize Mars

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A paper on the findings appear in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal Nature Chemical Biology. 

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.