On Monday I mentioned that I’ve been asked to start writing for the Nature Education blog Student Voices. Well, my first post has been published, entitled Engineering Solar Bacteria, and it’s all about taking genes from marine bacterioplankton and putting them in E. coli, allowing them to use light as an energy source! A fascinating topic, something I might cover in more detail on Homologous Legs in the future.
Here’s a little taste:
Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we didn’t have to regularly eat food, absorbing the energy we need to live from sunlight instead? If we were genetically engineered to be phototrophs — able to use light as an energy source like plants and algae — this would be a normal part of life. Skeptical that this could ever happen outside of a science fiction novel? Barring any tricky ethical issues, it’s probably closer than you might at first think.
I’d love it if you commented – you’ll need to set up a SciTable account, but don’t worry, it’s fairly easy to do.
Recent Comments