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The following is not an ordinary photograph created by regular digital camera. It’s a picture produced by living genetically-engineered E. coli bacteria—an alive 100-megapixel camera.

University of Texas at Austin Molecular Biology Department: A bacteria-produced photo of an enlarged E. coli bacterium—a “self portrait.”

PC Magazine:
It’s been a rough few years for film. First digital photography took all of its glory—and now even lowly bacteria can capture a Kodak moment. Using a genetically modified form of E coli—the bacteria that can wreak havoc at cookouts—researchers at the University of California San Francisco have developed a biological light sensor. The images it creates take hours to form and are monochrome only, but bacteria’s minute size allows for super-high resolution, about 100 megapixels per square inch—ten times what you can get today.

Holy macro. This “BioFilm” can potentially generate a resolution of 100MP per square inch!!! With this magnification, will the photo become ugly??? Imagine you can see things on your face that cannot be seen with your naked eyes. Micro deep valleys (aka wrinkles), maybe? More biofilm pictures here.

University of Texas at Austin:
Students Aaron Chevalier, Jeff Tabor and Laura Lavery beam with pride when passing around their new pictures. But the photos they’re showing off aren’t from a backpacking trip around Europe or a hiking expedition in the Rockies. They’re passing around some of the first-ever bacterial photographs—living pictures they created on biological film made of E. coli bacteria.

The ghostlike photos—images of people, words and buildings—were made when the students exposed Petri dishes holding billions of genetically engineered E. coli to patterns of light. A new biological circuit in the E. coli gives them the ability to sense light and make black pigment. Each bacterium acts like a pixel on a computer screen, turning black when growing in the dark part of a projection and staying clear in the light.

The University of Texas at Austin students made the bacterial photographs for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which encourages students to build simple biological machines.

There’s no winner of the iGEM contest, but the team was rewarded when their research was published in the Nov. 26 issue of Nature, in an issue focused on the field of synthetic biology.

Read more on: utexas.edu

Already people have come up with ideas to apply this BioFilm technology in our daily living. Here is one at UCSF: Targeting Tumors with Bacteria to Create Tumor Imaging.

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