WIKIMEDIA, NIAIDCircadian clock machinery from cyanobacteria has been successfully reconstructed inside Escherichia coli bacteria, which do not have a natural day-night cycle, according to a paper published today (June 12) in Science Advances. The E. coli cells exhibited 24-hour-long repeating oscillations in both transcription of a reporter gene and phosphorylation of a key clock protein. The results serve as a proof of principle that engineering such a synthetic circadian circuit is possible.
“The exciting thing is that this is really the first step towards using this wonderful protein clock in synthetic biology to actually do something, or produce something,” said circadian biologist Susan Golden of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work.
The project was borne out of a general interest in engineering cells that can measure time, explained study coauthor Pam Silver of Harvard Medical School. “It was really a ‘Gee, will it work?’ kind of experiment . . . just pure curiosity,” she said.
But beyond mere tinkering, the potential applications for engineered cells that exhibit diurnal rhythms are many. For instance, synthetic organisms could be designed to produce and secrete drugs at a certain time each day. Industrial ...
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