CODE WRITTEN FOR HACK LIVING CELLS!

Image: Janet Iwasa
MIT biological engineers have devised a programming language that can be used to give new functions to E. coli bacteria

Till today you knewed that programming languages were written to communicate machines or to express algorithms. But what if you came to know that language written to deal with living cells.

A bacteria could be programmed to help lactose intolerant people digest lactose. Even plant could benefit. They could contain a bacteria that produces insecticide when they sense they're being nibbled on.

Thus a new programming language, analogous to computer code, has been written that gives researchers the tools to create biological circuits inside living cells.At the moment, the circuits are simple, but more advanced versions could reprogram cells to detect cancer and then produce a drug to kill it on the spot.

Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering, said in press statement, "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

Voigt and colleagues at Boston  University and the National Institute of standards and Technology have built biological circuits capable of measuring light, temperature, acidity and other environmental conditions such as oxygen level or glucose.

His team plans to work on several different applications using this approach: bacteria that can be swallowed to aid in digestion of lactose; bacteria that can live on plant roots and produce insecticide if they sense the plant is under attack; and yeast that can be engineered to shut off when they are producing too many toxic byproducts in a fermentation reactor.

One of the circuits they built is the biggest of its kind; it contains seven logic gates and about 12,000 base pairs of DNA.

Image: Tal Danino and Vik Muniz
This image show a motherboard image micropatterned using programmable probiotic bacteria. The blue lines are composed of dots made of bacteria . This Technique was developed in the Bhatia laboratory.

With the new programming language, scientists  now have a standard method for fashioning these circuits, which means they can create them quickly and then test them ASAP.

Another advantage of this technique is its speed. Until now, “it would take years to build these types of circuits. Now you just hit the button and immediately get a DNA sequence to test,” Voigt says.

Voigt said he wants to make the language available on the Web for others to use. 

The team reported their research in this week's "Science." Just comment below your thoughts. We give you a quality content with our best efforts. Visit next time to site to see more great contents.